Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolour paints

I just treated myself to some new watercolours, and after seeing these Gansai Tambi paints on a few other blogs, I decided to get some too.

If you are in the UK, you can get them directly from Kuretake – www.kuretake.co.uk (and I think they have free shipping at the moment), but if you are elsewhere then I’d recommend getting them from Simon Says Stamp (link at the end of this post). They are pretty much the same price in dollars as they are in pounds, so if you are in the UK and have other things you might want to order from SSS, then you would save a bit of money even with shipping to get them from there.

I’ve got a few different cheap sets of watercolours, and I must admit, I’m quite amazed at the difference in quality. These aren’t the cheapest paints, but in my opinion these are well worth the money. They are really creamy, and the pigmentation in them is very high so you can get a really good opaque coverage, or water them down for a more translucent effect. They mix really well, and even just with colouring straight from the pan, you get a lovely selection of colours. The pans are large, so you do get a lot of paint in each one, and you can also buy the pans individually, so you can replace them as you need to.

For my first project with them, I stamped an image from the Paper Smooches Blossoming Blooms set in Versamark and I heat embossed it with white embossing powder.

I then had a play with the watercolours. For most of the colours I just used them straight from the pan, but the pink and lilac were made by blending some white with darker colours.

I was so pleased with the end result, I decided to make a couple of variations – I also wanted to see how well the paints would show on kraft card, as a lot of watercolours don’t work well on darker card.

Zig Kuretake Gansai Tambi 36 COLOR SET	Zig Kuretake Gansai Tambi 24 COLOR SET	Zig Kuretake Gansai Tambi 12 COLOR SET	Zig Kuretake Gansai Tambi 18 COLOR SET
Paper Smooches BLOSSOMING BUDS Clear Stamps	*Sakura KOI LARGE WATERBRUSH Water Brush Watercolor #8	Yasutomo FLAT NIB MEDIUM WATER BRUSH Niji 12mm KWB20	*Versamark WATERMARK Rubber Stamp Emboss Chalk Resist INK PAD
*WOW Embossing Powder OPAQUE BRIGHT WHITE SUPER FINE WL01SF	Mama Elephant BIRTHDAY SCRIPT Creative Cuts Steel Die Set MEL-1102	*Sizzix BIG SHOT MACHINE Powder Blue & Teal 657900	Pretty Pink Posh 4MM ORCHID Cupped Sequins
*Pretty Pink Posh 6MM SPARKLING CLEAR Cupped Sequins	Pretty Pink Posh 4MM AQUAMARINE Cupped Sequins	*Pretty Pink Posh 4MM SPARKLING CLEAR Cupped Sequins	Pretty Pink Posh 4MM MARSHMALLOW Cupped Sequins
Pretty Pink Posh 4MM MOSSY GREEN Cupped Sequins	Pretty Pink Posh 4MM FRESH MINT Cupped Sequins	*Claudine Hellmuth Studio MINI MULTI MEDIUM MATTE Glue Adhesive Paint Ranger