For Daniel Smith, color is … everything! Extra Fine watercolor pans, beautiful Watercolor Sets make the artists go wild! Color has always been the main reason– to fill your palette with the beauty and the emotion that sets your imagination free!
Mayan Orange is hot and intense. Use it straight from the tube for a blazing red-orange. As you add water, the color remains strong and disperses very evenly. Rich, bold colors adorned the murals and sculpture of the Mayan people. Even when exposed to centuries of severe heat and humidity, these colors have hardly faded over a thousand years. Now, using methods derived from ancient Mayan chemistry, these unique, metal-free pigments have been recreated using an eco-friendly process. The colors are smooth, non-granulating and semi-transparent. Their versatility, durability and exquisite hues make them colors you’ll reach for again and again.
Experience a saturated yellow with a rich history, you’ll love its transparency and smooth working properties. A natural looking yellow with a very slight green-brown cast – great for foliage highlights! This stunning watercolor revives the bold color used by the ancient Mayan people to adorn their murals and sculpture. Now using an eco-friendly process, with methods derived directly from the ancient Mayans, this unique, metal-free pigment is available to you. Its versatility, durability and exquisite hue will make it a color you’ll reach for again and again.
Bring a natural glow to your palette with this stunning sienna earth tone. Subtle granulation and a delicate transparency make this watercolor especially useful for portraits and landscapes. This low staining pigment is very workable and has excellent lightfastness.
Water frees this amazing three-pigment blend to perform miracles. Watch and wait as Anthraquinoid Red floats, Ultramarine Blue settles and Viridian grays the resulting violet color. Selectively blot and lift a surface wash to expose delicate blue-greens. A description of the fascinating light and dark washes can never match a personal experience! Use Moonglow in shadows and as a silhouette pigment and enjoy its reaction to salt application in background washes. Its neutral tinting property makes it effective with almost all the DANIEL SMITH watercolors. Try introducing the Luminescent Interference pigments to areas of wet, damp or dry Moonglow. Look to Undersea Green as a companion pigment. And try a Moonglow sky and long shadows on sunset snow scenes.
Naples Yellow will make you think of late Summer with it’s sunflowers, wheat fields and sunny, dry landscapes. This dusty yellow with a touch of Venetian Red is made a neutral semi-opaque with the addition of zinc oxide. More ideas for Naples Yellow would be dry yellow grasses easily brushstroked over painted fences and barns, the zinc oxide opacity aiding the Naples Yellow to show over darker colors.
When mixed with any other color, Neutral Tint produces glowing darker values of that color. Our chemist developed this perfect, neutral gray – neither warm nor cool – that quickly and reliably tones down colors and mixes rich, luminous darks. Since its development in 2012, artists have found Neutral Tint to be an essential addition to their palettes for expanding their range of colors.
Unlike other brands, DANIEL SMITH New Gamboge is an excellent lightfast formulation. It’s a transparent organic pigment from the yellow to orange zone of your color wheel. More staining than Yellow Ochre and equal in tinting ability to Raw Sienna. It’s a good substitute for those colors when transparency and non-granulation is desired while avoiding thick, muddy passages.
Nickel Azo Yellow in mass tone resembles Yellow Ochre, and when thinned in washes, becomes a brilliant, glowing yellow. This transparent yellow is perfect for Autumn leaves from the duller, ochre older leaves to the brilliant yellow of sunlit leaves against the deep blue Autumnal sky!
The most vivid of all pinks, has long been requested by DANIEL SMITH customers. A primary magenta with a hint of fluorescent pink granulation producing some of the most brilliant glowing mixes you have ever seen. Try mixing Opera Pink with our New Gamboge for fiery oranges or with an Indanthrone Blue for stunning violets and glowing purples.
This low-staining deep orange is sometimes called Scarlet Lake or Rose Carthame. Oranges can be very difficult to work with, but this one excels in handling and is a good option over Cadmium Orange.
This beautiful watercolor is a cool blue gray. Highly lightfast and mildly staining, Payne’s Gray is perfect for painting wet skies. Use this pigment instead of Indigo, except where yellow is involved. Payne’s Gray helps create flat ocean waters and after-the-storm clouds and skies. Rocks and granite boulders, including their shadows, can be quickly rendered with light dilute washes or more concentrated brushloads.
Why choose Luminescent Watercolors? Because Nature has optical surprises in the colors that you see in birds’ feathers, insects, fish, and seashells, many flowers also have a pearly, dewy sheen to them. Consider the iridescence of a snail’s trail or a silvery spider’s web. Other things that also have a sparkle, or glow depending on the light, a silvery or golden moon, clouds aglow at sunset, rainbows, the sparkle of snow and ice, and glint of water reflections. Don’t forget the sheen of metals like pewter, copper, silver, and gold. There are also mythic subjects that are often thought of as having a special iridescence to them such as fairies, dragons, mermaids and other fantasy figures.
Perinone Orange, with its vast range from vivid intensity to pale, transparent, fleshy washes, is a clear, clean vat pigment. From carrots to soft gladiola and azalea petals, this pure chroma orange is a treat for the eye and a dream to handle. Use in place of Cadmiums when mixing and revel in its glowing transparency. Play with salt texture and lift and squeegee techniques.
Permanent Alizarin Crimson, developed with our customers, blends pigments to produce an exceptionally lightfast red with true Alizarin Crimson character and versatility. Like classic Alizarin, it is vibrant, medium staining and very transparent, with the undeniable advantage of permanence. Try a rich and bold application or a blush of crimson color in a light wash, we know you’ll love this beautiful shade.
If you want to add atmospheric or emotional punch to your work, then squeeze some transparent Perylene Green onto your palette. It exhibits an almost black mass tone that spreads to a beautiful blue/green wash without producing mud – a color perfect for delineating shadows or creating moody landscapes, ominous horizons and stormy seas. A medium-staining pigment with intensity and softness, Perylene Green is highly soluble and easy to use. It glazes under or over other colors ~a very cool color~ allowed one of our more demanding artist/testers.
Perylene Red is medium staining and semi-tranparent. It creates vivid, dark washes with a clean brilliant red-orange. This sedimentary pigment offers an additional health plus, as it is made from a metal-free red. Clean modern pigments such as this will put accidental mud-making in the past.
A deep, luscious, grape-juicy reddish-violet. The masstone is dark and intense, shifting in tints toward a rich red violet with a brownish-purple cast. Because of its relative neutrality, it’s a natural-looking choice for portrait, landscape or botanical work-imagine how good it looks with complementary greens. It also makes strong, interesting shadows.
For cool, clean staining shadows and reflected light on windows, super staining, super transparent Phthalo Blue Green Shade is a popular pure chroma organic pigment. Mix with Hansa Yellow for luminous greens.
A powerful blue with a slightly red undertone, this popular pigment is valued for its strength and economy – just a daub of paint can color a whole sky. A dash of blue gives a full range of value. Mix dark colors for shading and shadows by combining Phthalo Blue with Quinacridone Rose. Use Phthalo Blue’s transparent quality to create containers and water around stems.
Phthalo Green (Blue Shade) is a black-green. Concentrated to diluted states, it is a transparent and super staining green. Organic and absolutely lightfast, most artists find this color indispensable. The slightly bluish shade can be readily modified with yellows and reds. Creates luminous, effective darks or clean glazes.