A couple of years ago, a friend of mine at DeviantART.com mentioned Daniel Smith watercolors to me and gave me the link to their site. I lost it of course. That was two computers ago, four browsers and a lot of bookmarks! Just Googling on the company name will turn it up fast enough. What I did do was sign up for the free catalog and email coupons. I've been disabled for all my life and my mobility impairments are now extreme. But even when they weren't as bad, back in 1990 when I started living as a full time artist in the French Quarter of New Orleans, I discovered catalog companies and the way anything from a mail order catalog or online supplier tends to run about half the price of the same exact product in retail. Art supplies always pay for themselves. Just sell some art and even the expensive stuff will pay itself back in a pretty short order. You don't even have to be a full timer to apply this -- I was selling art as a hobbyist all through the years I had a regular job and it kept me in the best supplies for any medium I wanted to play with.
I just like getting twice as much stuff for the money, that's all. So I was already warm to the notion of Daniel Smith's main marketing method. I haven't seen this paint in stores much. I see it in their catalog and it moves by word of mouth.
My friend Aladyx is an incredible watercolorist. She does powerful, large, vivid works saturated in rich color. I'd been using several different brands, mostly in pan colors because I like to work small. Daniel Smith watercolors don't come in pans, so I didn't even look at them back then. She swore by Daniel Smith and suggested I try them. I resisted the notion, perhaps because I'd just invested a fair chunk of change in some Winsor & Newton Artist watercolors and wasn't used to those colors yet after a lifetime of using Winsor & Newton Cotman.
One thing you will notice going from even a good student or university grade brand like Winsor & Newton Cotman to artist grade watercolors is that the paint is stronger. It goes a long way with just a little paint, and if it's dried, it picks up on a wet brush fast. The pigment is ground finer in artist grade watercolors. Thus, the proportion of pigment particles to binder is a lot higher. If you fill a jar with pebbles, it won't weigh as much as the same jar filled with sand.
Daniel Smith watercolors are an artist grade brand. They are comparable in my experience to Winsor & Newton Artist Watercolors, for how finely ground the pigments are and how strong the colors are. The binder is excellent. It lifts with just a touch after it's dried. One of the things I never really "got" with tube watercolors is that many artists who use them buy a big palette with a lot of little slants around the sides, then squeeze out paint in their own organized way and let it dry.
Yep. In effect, you make your own pan watercolor setup but you choose what colors are in the set by buying tubes individually. Also, you can use tube watercolors to refill the half pans or full pans in a pan set of watercolors. Some companies even sell empty half pans and full pans so that you can build your own watercolor box in handy portable form.
Daniel Smith sells watercolors, oils and acrylic paint with their own brand name and carries a few other products like some Sennelier pastels. Their prices on other brands aren't as good as Dick Blick's and the selection isn't that great, but they have a few interesting things on the site like glass pencil sharpeners -- classy little ink-bottle looking things with a pencil sharpener over the jar. The site is worth windowshopping for oddities not found elsewhere, but I'd check Blick and ASW first on anything that isn't their brand name.
This is all made up by their main stock in trade, the Daniel Smith watercolors, oils and acrylics. I've tried the watercolors. I got plenty of email coupons over the past couple of years, mostly for sales on Watercolor Triads. Daniel Smith will pick out three colors and bundle them together, then get an artist to do a good sample painting just using those three colors and nothing else, and sell that trio at a huge discount compared to their everyday prices. Very often the triads include one or two of their most expensive pigments at a lower cost per tube than single tubes of their cheapest pigments.
Daniel Smith has several specialties that I windowshopped and drooled at. One is that they have semiprecious stone pigments: lapis lazuli, malachite, tigereye and so on, ground to pigments and creating unusual pure-pigment colors. These run expensive but looked so lush in the samples that I was sorely tempted -- and some of the Triads include one of those.
Like some acrylic companies, they have Interference colors. Using mica in the pigment, this creates an iridescent paint that changes color depending on the angle you look at it. Their Duochrome colors have this effect too, but it's even more pronounced.
So a few weeks ago, I finally saw a Triad that I liked at a time that I wasn't broke and could just order it on impulse. Why not? My friend kept telling me these are better than Winsor & Newton, I love the painting she did for me, and this triad is something I could actually use by itself: the Sea 'N Shore Triad. Indanthrone Blue, Ultramarine Turquoise and golden brown Goethite make a perfect combination for seascapes with sand. The Goethite used thin and washed over with the turquoise creates a perfect wet-sand color and it granulates, making a cool sandy texture. I looked at the sample painting and ordered it.
I didn't have any of those colors in my other sets, so this expanded my range and let me try a new brand.
My package was a little slow arriving, compared to how fast Blick usually sends my supplies. They shipped the day after I ordered, but it comes by USPS and it got slowed, probably by Homeland Security regulations. Blick uses FedEx and it's always there in a week.
Once I got it, I found a happy surprise inside. They put together a sampler of 12 other colors with a good sized dollop allowed to dry on a thick piece of watercolor paper. The top row of samples were the Primary Triad and Secondary Triad, the bottom row included Quinacridone Gold, my familiar old friend Burnt Umber and one of their droolworthy expensive mineral pigments, Sodalite Genuine. Next to that was a big swipe of black gouache with some sort of barrier spray used over it to keep the paint from stirring it up, and three of their Luminescent watercolors: Duochrome Aquamarine, Iridescent Gold and Interference Green (which is purplish-red at the edges).
Wow. I didn't just have three new colors to try, I had thirteen! The blue in the Primaries set is French Ultramarine, but the red is Perylene Red and the yellow is Hansa Yellow Medium, both of which were new to me. Green is Undersea Green, a proprietary mixed-pigment color of theirs. Carbazone Violet is clear, strong and brilliant in hue. Quinacridone Burnt Orange isn't the usual sunny orange of a spectrum set. It's a powerful rich deep color with a long value range that could easily become a basis for skin tones. It brightens up fast mixed with the Hansa Yellow.
I had a big ATC swap to complete, nine Under the Sea cards to finish before the end of the month. So I set out the sampler card and started doing Under the Sea paintings for my friends. Naturally I tried all the Luminescent colors first on a piece of black Rising Stonehenge.
This is where they rock. Not only did those three together form a good range of hues, but they showed up strong. See my illustration. The color-changing properties of the Duochrome Aquamarine and Interference Green gave the luminous creatures a rainbow shimmer that included blues and red-violets, while touches of gold warmed it and extended the implied spectrum. Best of all, it showed up very bright on the black background.
When I scanned it, unlike several other experiments with metallic and iridescent mediums on black, it showed up as bright as it did in life. This is important if you're selling art online or showing it online. Many times iridescents and metallics darken and muddy in a scan or photo, they're hard to show off. But these particular Luminescent colors were the reverse -- maybe it was the mica and the color-shifting effect, but the scanner picked them up as bold as in life.
I found out that Sodalite Genuine was wonderful as a blue-black darkener close to Paynes Grey, one that granulates and has an interesting texture. It's very strong with a deep value range and it mixes well with anything on that card. It's wonderful for glazing. The two Quinacridones, which are expensive in Winsor & Newton, were just as strong and transparent as I thought they'd be and I love the hues. Undersea Green is an olive with a deep range, close to Sap Green but a little yellower. It mixed with the French Ultramarine for a muted blue-green.
Carbazole Violet mixed with Sodalite Genuine makes a perfect shadow color, the proportion can vary but either direction it'll be cool and natural.
I did five of my ATCs using the sampler and the Duochrome Aquamarine tab is half used up, mostly because I did the entire background of one using it. If you paint ACEOs or ATCs, you'll find out that a lot of collectors are very fond of glitter or iridescence, anything shimmery or metallic goes a long way in that market -- but it's hard to scan and show off online. Except for these Daniel Smith Luminescents that show up wonderfully. I'm looking forward to trying them on deep blue paper too, and other tinted papers. They'll be good as thin glazes over other colors, as mixtures and as special-effect detail paints.
The gold when fully loaded can be as strong and bright as shell gold, which is good when you're doing medieval illumination and other gold detailing for splendor. It's another of my hobbies, but a pet peeve about many metallic paints and pencils is that the silver will be bright but the gold will look more like bronze. Iridescent Gold looks more like bright gold than bronze, a big plus to me. It is a lot less expensive than the 24KT gold tabs at ASW, which I would prefer to reserve for doing goldwork on parchment and other fine historical recreation projects.
While I don't like them more than my Winsor & Newton Artist Watercolors, I like them in the same way -- and the price is right. Daniel Smith watercolors come in generous 15ml tubes for prices not much more than a 5ml Winsor & Newton Artist watercolor tube. I had two colors with the same pigment for comparison in the sampler: Burnt Umber and French Ultramarine. Both were as strong as the Winsor & Newton, the same hue, the same handling and easy solubility.
I'd recommend these to anyone -- including beginners. One problem that happens in many mediums is that a beginner using student materials will have problems created by the supplies without realizing that it's not a skill issue. Artist grade materials often make it easier to get better effects, in the case of watercolors they help to get stronger passages. I had a common problem for years of my watercolors coming out too pale and washed out because I couldn't judge how much a wash would lighten as it dried. Artist grade watercolors seriously help with that because it's easier to take up more paint on the brush for deeper values.
The colors chosen in the sampler are a good range, but Daniel Smith also has several sets available with palettes developed by signature artists like Susie Short. What colors and triads and sets suit your tastes is individual. I was happy with the 12 color sampler because in effect I had another set to explore, and ten out of twelve colors were new ones, most on the list of colors I wanted to try anyway!
My Sea 'n Shore Triad came with free shipping because of the email coupon, so I'd recommend signing up for their email program to watch for bargains like that. And get the catalog, it explains a lot about the mineral pigments, luminescent pigments and other house specialties. Daniel Smith now has a permanent place in my list of artist brands to try new colors in -- and I owe my friend Aladyx a note with "Yep, you get an I Told You So." They rock. Don't be afraid to try them. Good quality doesn't always mean top price in art supplies.
