17 Jun Camel Artists’ Watercolours- Swatches

So I have long been thinking of the best budget watercolour and paper combo.

In pursuit of that knowledge, I have been going back to trying Camel Artists’ Watercolours a few years after I stopped using them.

Now that my skills and understanding have improved, I feel I can review them once more to understand if they compare to the ‘fancier’ brands. I can also try figuring out what shades from their chart work for a basic watercolour palette.

Pros:

They retail for INR 60 (for Series 1) and INR 70 (for Series 2) in India for the 20ml tubes. That is pretty affordable if you ask me! Not a single other brand can compete with that, even their student grades.

They also have a reasonable range of 48 colours. Here is a link to seeing the shade card on their website. They have various sets in smaller 5ml and 10ml tubes, and in individual tubes of 20ml.

Cons: 

Unknown information on the quality and longevity or composition of the paints. This makes it questionable to use them for any display or archival purposes. But when one is starting out, archival quality is not really the most important feature.

The Cakes /Tin – In the past, I have had average-to-poor experiences with the Camel Watercolour cakes.  I feel they had too much binder and filler in them, making it hard to get rich colour from those dry-ass bits in the tin.

Tubes – My experience with the tubes has not been all bad, barring a few colours which were difficult to handle. I just I completely left them by the wayside once I got into the pigment exploration of things since they don’t specify any pigment numbers etc, and well… I got lured by the fancier new paints I had.

Swatches:

I went through the shade card and bought about 14 of the 20ml individual tubes to see what they look like. I also want to compare them to my basic CMY colour wheel primaries, to shortlist a final palette entirely of Camel AWC.

For now, here are the swatches of the 14 colours I chose from Camel Artist Watercolours. I will shortly follow up with detailed explorations of each.

The colours have no pigment information, so I have just listed their names, opacity info, series number and permanence.

This information is from the tube itself.

Name – Title of the colour as per the tube

Series – determines the cost and the Series 1 tubes retail for INR 60, with Series 2 at INR 70, each.

Box depicting opacity – A Transparent paint is depicted with a black-outlined sqaure. Semi-transparent ones with a half filled square, and completely opaque paints with a fully black-filled square.

Permanence – A stands for most permanent, with C being least.