(click on the pics to enbiggan)
Adding beautiful shimmery golden accents to your card designs doesn't get much easier than this! I recently got my hands on a set of Gansai Tambi Starry Colors and instantly fell in love. This collection of water-based pigments are super-infused with mica, come in generously sized traditional solid Japanese watercolor pans and are available at an amazing price!
The hues will stop you in your tracks! The color names listed on my box referenced Blue Gold, Red Gold, Yellow Gold, Champagne Gold, Light Gold and White Gold. But, I think the packaging on my box came from their earliest production, because I see they have renamed them Gemini Yellow Gold, Cazimi Gold, Lyra Gold, Star Dust Gold, Aether Pearl and Luna Silver.
They can be used on their own for Sumi-e brush painting, dipped pen calligraphy, brush lettering and watercolor work. The shimmery colors can be mixed in with other Gansai Tambi watercolors to create custom hues or you can paint right over previously watercolored work with as much opacity or translucency you like--it's all about the amount of water you use.
While I was playing with them, I tried both mixing and painting over the top and found that mixing with color, produced a more delicate, overall translucent shimmer. I noticed I also had to swirl my paintbrush around to remix the color + gold just prior to actually painting because they do separate and the heavier mica particles settle at the bottom of the palette wells. Just something to be aware of if you are trying to custom mix your own shimmery colors this way. Painting straight Starry Colors over the top of previously laid down (and dried) color enabled me to vary the intensity of the shimmer in specific areas with greater control.
The colors are stunning on either watercolor paper or black card stock and the opacity over black/dark card stock is rich and luminous!
I wanted to compare the Starry Colors with the metallics in the 36 pc. set of Gansai Tambi watercolors, (to the left and right). The Starry Colors are decidedly more shimmery whereas the Metallic Gansai Tambi have a more matte, altho still somewhat shimmery metallic finish. The hues and shimmer are significantly different and not duplicates of the other.
Another fun thing to note is that if you wanted to swap any or all of them into the 36 pc. box, the pans are the same size as the others and will fit without any problem! Cool!
The effects are quite dazzling, whether painted alone on off-white watercolor paper or atop other colors to give them shimmery highlights.
Over black card stock, they show up easily and with stunning opacity--I don't normally make single-layer black cards, but these paints make it hard to stop wanting to make a mile high stack of 'em!
As with any water-soluble painting medium, you will want to stamp your images with bleed-proof inks or heat emboss, to avoid any bleeding or muddying.
LINK: Watch in HD on our YouTube Channel HERE and thanks for watching!
I hope you enjoyed taking a closer look at the Gansai Tambi Starry Colors--they are positively DREAMY, and once you try them, I think you'll become as obsessed as I am with them!
Thanks for joining me!
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