Kuretake Watercolor Paints Gansai Tambi 24-Color Set 2 Art Nouveau

Kuretake's Gansai Tambi watercolours are hand-crafted pigment colours in solid pan form – a painting tradition rooted in over 120 years of Sumi ink craftsmanship from Nara, Japan. The 24-colour "Art Nouveau" set brings together a cohesive palette of muted neutrals, dusty pinks, mossy greens and subdued blues, complemented by warm earth tones and select vibrant accents. The colours come as large-format pans and can be applied transparently like classic watercolour or, with less water, almost opaquely like gouache, depending on the amount of water used.

Features

• Creamy, soft consistency: The pigment paste dissolves quickly and evenly on the brush with just light wetting – even large washes achieve seamless transitions without streaking. No pre-soaking of pans required.
• Variable opacity: Little water produces rich, almost gouache-like coverage; plenty of water creates delicate, translucent glazes. Both techniques can be achieved with the same colour pan – on light and dark paper alike.
• Large-format pans (48 × 28 mm): The pans are significantly larger than those in typical watercolour sets. Wide flat brushes and aquarelle mops can be fully loaded without damaging the colour cake.
• Art Nouveau colour palette: The 24 tones draw inspiration from the European Art Nouveau period at the turn of the century: muted neutrals such as Beige Gray and Green Gray, warm earth tones like Mars Yellow and Venetian Red, dusty pinks such as Potter's Pink and Old Mauve, mossy greens like Ivy Green and Shadow Green – complemented by select vibrant accents like Vermillion and Cobalt Turquoise Light.
• Pigment-based with water-soluble resin binder: Unlike Western watercolours, which are based on gum arabic, Gansai Tambi uses a water-soluble resin. This creates a characteristically paste-like surface in the pan and intense colour release even with minimal water.
• Lightfastness: The colours are lightfast for normal use. With heavily diluted glazes, lightfastness decreases – light-protected storage of artwork is particularly recommended for transparent techniques.
• Packaging with colour swatch sheet: The cardboard box includes a blank swatch sheet for swatching all 24 tones – practical for colour planning before painting.

Use & Tips

• Illustration & botanical drawing: The high pigment density allows for detailed illustrations with sharp edges and saturated areas. Applied with minimal water, fine lines remain clearly defined.
• Watercolour washes & wet-on-wet: Heavily diluted, they create translucent background layers that blend softly wet-on-wet. The muted colour palette keeps even large backgrounds tonally harmonious.
• Sumi-e and Etegami: The format is rooted in Japanese painting tradition – the colours harmonise particularly well with rice paper, smooth watercolour paper and absorbent Japanese papers.
• Calligraphy combinations: As a background colour behind black ink calligraphy, the muted Art Nouveau tones shine without competing with the lettering. Flat brushes or wide aquarelle mops work well for even background areas.
• Travel & Urban Sketching: The solid pan form is travel-friendly, requires no closing and no cleaning time. The compact cardboard box fits easily into a sketch bag.
• Mixing: The colours blend well together on the palette. A damp brush is enough to pick up the tones directly from the pan.

For Watercolour Enthusiasts

Gansai Tambi are hand-crafted in Japan – small cracks on the surface of the colour cakes are a normal feature of this manufacturing process and do not affect quality. The water-soluble resin binder instead of gum arabic creates a colour behaviour that noticeably differs from Western watercolours: colour release is more intense, the consistency in the pan creamier, and the colours tend to lighten less on drying than many gum-arabic-bound watercolours. The Art Nouveau set deliberately contains no pure black and no pure white. Instead, Beige Gray, Green Gray and Pale Aqua serve as neutral anchor points – a choice that enables atmospherically muted works without breaking through excessive contrast. Not archival.

Technical Specifications