Review on Caran Museum Aquarelle Colours 3510 312 by Nicole Mcleod

When I first heard about these pens I thought they were the best watercolor pencils, period. I've wanted to try them since I first heard about them. All I can say is thank goodness I bought the smallest set because I really don't think they live up to the hype and aren't worth the price they are being sold for. Although the marketers are one-on-one, thank them for calling them "museum watercolors" - this combined with the misleading photography really got me there for a while before trying them out. Cons: The only way to get results like the packaging/cover photo would be to dip the pen in water, let it soak a bit, and then apply a thick coat of paint. At least that's the only way I was able to achieve the same color reproduction as with these pens. This is a legal way to use watercolor pencils, but if you only used these pens you would use up your pens very quickly. If I could limit my use of these pens to just small details that would be fine, but I can't imagine using them on an entire painting of any size. It's very difficult for your hand to work this way and it really takes away the fun of using watercolor brushes. pencil) until I tried many brushes. Very soft brushes or very hard brushes gave the opposite results: not enough paint was activated by the water, or too much paint was simply lifted with the brush. I finally found honey. a soft hazelnut that I could use to change the color to get the right color distribution. This becomes a big problem when you're trying to create highlights, midtones, and shadows by mixing colors so that your colors have depth and don't look flat. I think it's due to the amount of wax used in the binding. The wax seems to want to cling to the paper and acts almost like a resistance. Unfortunately, the more layers of paint you use to achieve these results, the more waxy you become and the more difficult it becomes to blend the colors, which is very frustrating. Maybe that makes it easier if you get all the colors they offer, but with the results I've had with this set, I'd rather put in more tubes of watercolor pencils than any other watercolor pencil. I found that gray and black suit me. very grainy and too transparent which I didn't like at all. I thought the 12 colors were based on a dual base system (ie one of each base color in cool tone and warm tone) but was completely turned off, it was aqua instead of green. The warm red was very yellow-red and the cool red was fuchsia. With no true red, green, and blue (so neither warm nor cool), I had trouble getting the right shade of green or blue by warming or cooling them with other colors. The only thing that helped was having gray in this set so you could at least get different tones of each color, so for example "turquoise" would be less vibrant if you layered the gray first, giving you a muted, cool blue tone. Pros: If you want to use your best Kolinsky sable brushes with these pens, you can achieve a very soft, light color fill by running a wet brush over the tip of the pen and using the wet brush with color. applied directly from the pencil to the paper (wet on dry or wet on wet). The colors seem very translucent to me when used this way after swatching and painting them (not opaque or gouache like I've read in other reviews, although you do get a waxy layer as you layer more and more, if you use them by applying the paint directly to the paper with a pencil and then applying it with a wet brush, which makes it difficult to spread the paint well). In the end I found these to be possibly the best wax based "crayons" out there. market as they are very soft and easy to apply and mix with other colors. So if you look at them from that angle, they outperform their Luminance colored pencils (which I really like and will probably use with pencils in the future) and not watercolor pencils). . But that's not why I bought it. If you enjoy coloring with colored pencils I would say they are awesome but not like watercolor pencils. Companies have already figured out how to make a really good watercolor pencil.