[Aquanet] Fw: paint brands?

[David Becker]

Back a few years ago I was using mostly a variety of brands which consisted
of WN, Daniel Smith, and a few talen van gogh which is what I had
recommended to students that didn¹t have a lot of money to spend but needed
a good amount of paint. Then about three years ago I went with Maimeriblu
Watercolor because I was going to endorse it but I hated the way that paint
felt and lucky for me they didn¹t treat me very nice at the Expo in Burbank
so I dropped them. At the same time however Linda Kemp introduced me to the
people over at Holbein and they were giving me their sales pitch and I
wasn¹t going to fall into that trap again so I asked them for about 10 tubes
of paint and I would test them and get back to them about if I wanted to
endorse their watercolors in my workshops. They claimed that their
watercolors won¹t dry to a hard rock on your W/C palette but instead a
rubbery blob. So that was right around the holidays and I squeeze out a
pretty good helping of paint into a new palette, they said that you should
squeeze out a lot of paint because you won¹t be wasting it because with just
a squirt of water it becomes very manageable again. I also thought I better
squeeze in other brands of paint to see what they do. The holidays came upon
our class so I left the palette on a top shelf in our classroom for 5 weeks
with just the top of the palette on it. We came back in January and opened
the palette and the results were: The Talen Van Gogh 2.00dollar tubes were
pretty hard, I pried them out of the palette cut them in half and wet them
to see how well I could get them to loosen up again. It took a lot of
rubbing and mooching around to get it loosened up. The WN and Daniel smiths
paints varied by the color some were harder then others but weren¹t to bad
but most had a harder shell that you could break through to get more juicy
paint. The Holbein paints were sticky to the touch and when sprayed with
water would loosen up very easily. I was very much surprised but I wasn¹t
totally sold until I knew what colors they had and how they handled. I
called them and asked for 10 more colors from their chart which they sent.
WOW 20 colors that I didn¹t pay for, I figure even if I didn¹t endorse them
in the end I would have still come ahead in the end. I did a bunch of washes
on scrap pieces of paper in my class and had the class also help  with
seeing how they liked the feeling of painting with the Holbein W/C paints.
Our conclusion was that Holbein paints were very smooth and many of the
colors we used were very intense. I felt that I could mix some of the best
grays because of the intense colors. The only thing we didn¹t like was that
the names were different and we couldn¹t figure out which color compared to
the other makers colors. They didn¹t have any Quinacradone colors  on their
list so I questioned them about that, their answer was that they were the
first to have colors of that intensity like the color Opera. I am still
testing many of their paints and am finally figuring out which colors I like
that compare to the colors that I was using before.
I now use mostly Holbein and I have one or 2 other colors of WN & Daniel
Smiths in my palette, but I have come to love the Holbein paints and in the
end decided to endorse them.
That was one of the better decisions I made and found their products and the
people at Holbein to be wonderful.
Funny that when I was in Vermont this last July I found out that the Holbein
family started in the business of paints in Montreal as the W/N main
distributors.

That¹s my 2 cents
David


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