Horadam Watercolors, Split-Primary Essential Set

This pocket-sized, affordable set of Schmincke Horadam watercolor offers artists the chance to paint in every color with one of the world's finest professional-grade paints. Included in the box are six 5 mL tubes, one warm and one cool tone from each primary color family—an absolutely ideal assortment for color mixing.

It's called the "split primary" or "dual primary" color system, and it allows painters to produce extremely high-chroma secondary colors that can be quite difficult to obtain with traditional mixing sets. Violet, orange, and green are vibrant and beautiful, with several shades of each secondary color available depending on how the primaries are combined.

For our test (pictured above) we painted a quick color wheel using the six Essential Set colors. You can see that each split-primary pair makes the familiar middle primary color when mixed; i.e., cool red and warm red make middle red. Mixing adjacent colors on the wheel produces vibrant secondaries, and mixing colors across the wheel produces pleasing muted tones.

The six colors included are:
Warm Red: #341 Geranium Red
Cool Red: #352 Magenta
Warm Blue: #494 Ultramarine
Cool Blue: #479 Helio Cerulean
Cool Yellow: #215 Lemon Yellow
Warm Yellow: #213 Chromium Yellow Hue Deep

Made in Germany.

About Schmincke Horadam watercolors:

Schmincke Horadam watercolors are among the world's finest professional-grade colors. First patented in 1892 by Schmincke co-founder Josef Horadam and continuously improved over more than a century of effort, Horadam watercolors are vibrant, smooth, and easy to apply to any kind of watercolor paper. Only the best artist pigments are used for the 140 colors that make up today's Horadam lineup. They're milled until the paint becomes creamy and utterly consistent, and each color shines when water is added.