Testing New Paint Formulas

Like most artists, I love trying out new art supplies. So when my friend Yves-Marie of Sennelier (a French manufacturer of fine artists supplies) asked me last year if I would be interested in testing some of their new formulas for watercolor paints for them, I quickly said 'yes' and waited eagerly for the samples to arrive. When the box arrived, I was a bit surprised - I was expecting a few tubes of paint - maybe a dozen, at the most. But the box contained 53 tubes! I began to hyperventilate a little as I thought about how I could possibly find the time to test and accurately review all these colors - and return my results before the one-month deadline.

But once I got started I calmed down quite a bit. The 53 tubes are various formulas for 12 different colors, so there are only about 4 or 5 variations for each of them.

Overall, every one of the samples is nice, and some of them are downright extraordinary. The variants between the different formulas are surprising, and it took me quite a while to conduct comparisons and write a review for each formula. For instance, the five samples of Ultramarine Blue vary in temperature from cool red tones to warm yellow tones, and all of the color samples have huge differences between them for opacity, absorbency, flow, texture, granulation, intensity, and color shifts. All these variations make it very hard to choose individual favorites from among the samples, and all of them provided outstanding results when used.

I love the exceptional quality of these paints, and I’ll be using a lot more Sennelier artist supplies from now on! The director of Sennelier asked me to recommend other artists to them that might also be willing to help out on this project to develop the new colors, and I gave him the names and contact information of several other watercolor artists. I hope they are having as much fun on these projects as I am!