MaimeriBlu Watercolors, Bijou Box of 16 Half Pans

This stunning set of MaimeriBlu watercolor comes in an equally stunning case. The metal travel box is made in Italy and commonly called a "bijou box," or jewel box. The outside features a tough, textured metallic silver finish that's unique to Maimeri, and the inside is coated with smooth white enamel for mixing.

Bijou boxes don't just look great—they also solve some of the problems with the lightweight, flexible steel boxes that are usually available for watercolorists. Rather than bendable clips that can let your paints fall out, a bijou box features removable guardrails that hold the pans in. The panels don't flex and warp as easily as other watercolor boxes, and the build quality is higher overall.

Inside the box are sixteen premium colors of MaimeriBlu, the signature watercolor from Italian color house Maimeri. It's an expanded palette that affords watercolorists the opportunity to paint with some of the most special colors made anywhere in the world. This upgraded bijou box features several high-series colors prized by serious painters, including cadmium yellow, two cobalt blues, and genuine viridian.

The full list of colors in this box: Chinese White, Cadmium Yellow Medium, Nickel Titanium Yellow, Transparent Yellow, Permanent Carmine, Quinacridone Magenta, Rose Madder Alizarin, Pyrrole Red, Viridian, Cobalt Blue Light, Ultramarine Deep, Cerulean Sky Blue, Brown Madder, Sepia, Mars Black, and Neutral Tint.

Once you run out of a color, we recommend refilling with MaimeriBlu tubes, which use the same formula and can simply be squeezed into the empty well and allowed to dry.

About MaimeriBlu watercolors:

We're enchanted by MaimeriBlu, a special line of single-pigment watercolors from Milan. Each of the 90 MaimeriBlu colors features a unique pigment, with zero pre-mixed convenience colors. It's hard to overemphasize how unusual this is in our industry. We don't know of any other manufacturer with this many single-pigment colors, and certainly not of a watercolor line that eschews mixes entirely.

To be clear, other manufacturers use mixed pigments for a good reason: it's difficult, expensive, and in some respects impractical to use 90 individual colorants in a complete line of artist colors. This is especially true of certain staple colors that are virtually always mixes, like Sap Green and Payne's Grey. Artists expect these colors to be within a predictable range across brands, and multi-pigment colors are often the only way to achieve that.

Frankly, Maimeri is not concerned with these orthodoxies. The manufacturer's principle for its watercolor is "an absolute purity of pigments," and following this credo to its logical endpoint, how could any tube contain more than one? Single-pigment colors produce cleaner mixes and are much more intuitive to use than multi-pigment colors.

In consequence, you may be surprised by some of Maimeri's watercolors. Sap Green, since it cannot be the usual mix of yellow and green pigments, is actually just chromium oxide green—a gorgeous, mossy color, but absolutely nothing like other Sap Green tubes in your kit. Payne's Grey is in fact synthetic indigo, a permanent pigment with the depth and intensity of multi-pigment Payne's Greys, bluer and without any hint of muddiness.

Another result of a watercolor line with 90 distinct pigments is that some rare and unusual choices are included here. Even experienced watercolorists have likely never painted with genuine indigo, which is the colorant in MaimeriBlu #422 Indigo. This expensive, lightfast pigment is made by fermenting indigo leaves and has a natural color that is completely unique. Other pigments in MaimeriBlu include earth from Italian quarries, an advanced true neutral Neutral Tint that reflects virtually no color, and a whopping 11 cobalt pigments.

As you would expect from a professional watercolor, MaimeriBlu also offers excellent handling and a lovely, thick paint body that can easily produce dark, intense marks and extremely transparent washes. Every pigment used in MaimeriBlu carries Maimeri's highest (three-star) lightfastness rating, so you can trust any color for long-term display.

12 mL metal tube with easy-open tapered cap. Made in Italy.