Exploring Gansai Tambi: Japanese Watercolors
I had never heard of Gansai Tambi watercolors until I received them as a gift. It wasn’t a small gift either, but a Kuretake 120th Anniversary Limited Edition palette featuring 100 different colors. They came in a rather impressive wooden box, with each of the pan sets stacked on top of each other. Admittedly, these watercolors have sat on my shelf for months, mainly because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. A quick internet search taught me that they are quite different from the watercolors I am used to painting with and I was hesitant to dive into a different medium. But 2024 is my year of growth and my year of sketchbooks, so this seemed like an opportune time to pull out something new.
From the Kuretake website, Gansai Tambi watercolor are:
Traditional Japanese pan watercolors for professional artists and crafters. It is recognizable by its vivid color and quick dissolution.
Top: Gansai Tambi; Bottom Winsory & Newton half pan palette.
Breaking down initial observations, the colors are indeed quite bright when just looking at the pans even before starting to play with them. Also, with 100 colors to choose from compared to the fourteen colors that are in my Winsor and Newton palette, the variety in and of itself is a little overwhelming. The box also has a ton of metallic colors, including a set of opals that appear white in the pan, but I imagine will be a vibrant color when used on black paper. The pan size is much larger than my W&N watercolors. The Gansai Tambi pans are more than twice the width of my W&N half pans, though they appear to be halfway full. Many videos and photographs I saw of other artists using Gansai Tambi, used it with a traditional bamboo brush, so I splurged and purchased two W&N bamboo brushes to try along with the new watercolor paints.
Thus far, I have worked primarily in Winsor & Newton and Holbein watercolor tube paints, where one of the primary benefits are their transparency and the ability to work in lots of layers. I tend to have the watercolors already put into half pans, as opposed to using the paints right out of the tube, which adds to the transparency. I also have a quite limited palette, mainly due to the size of my budget and having a small space to store my supplies. There are also benefits to a limited palette. It means that I have to spend quite a bit of time mixing my colors, which means that my colors can be more unique than just painting with the exact color that comes in a tube. I also primarily mix my colors in my palette tin.
The Gansai Tambi set does not come with a mixing tray of any kind. In my research, some artists use them as they are, while others will mix them together as you would other watercolor paints. My first attempt at playing with this watercolor set was to simply swatch out all of the colors. Each layer of the box came with its own cardstock page with boxes for each of the colors.
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The most obvious difference when you start to use the Gansai Tambi paints, even with just swatching the colors, is that they are much more opaque and I agree they are quite vibrant, certainly more vibrant than most of my paintings. At their most opaque, they almost dry with a glossy sheen, most likely from the concentrated pigments. The opaque quality makes the paints seem closer to gouache when you first start to paint with them. I believe that this will make it possible to layer colors on top of each other with less worry about the colors underneath. However, you can achieve quite transparent effects if you use a lot of water.
Here are the swatch pages for each layer in the box. They are incredibly bright and the color range is diverse. The metallics were especially fun to play with and I decided to swatch them both on the provided white swatch cards as well as a card of black watercolor paper. The opals were really the most impressive. If you hold the white cardstock swatch card to the light, you can see the hint of the different colors (green & pinks), but those colors really shine on the black watercolor paper.
To really experiment with the colors and see what they do on the page, I dedicated two pages of my sketchbook to playing with both the paints and my bamboo brushes. With the first page, I wanted to see how the color would mix with each other when wet. One of the frustrating, but also fun things about watercolor, is that how much water you use can make a difference. Add a too-wet brush to an area that you are painting and you will get a watercolor bloom, which you may or may not want on your finished painting. I do not mind blooms when I am painting a landscape, but I dread them when I am working on something more realistic, where you want everything to blend smoothly. For my first page, I worked on creating a number of overlapping circles to see how the paints would mix and blend with each other. With enough water, you could still achieve really beautiful bloom effects. When the circles were dry, the opacity also allowed for a nice layering effect. I also used my bamboo brushes to experiment with creating thin line work.
For my second play page, I wanted to create simple overlapping lines to play with the opacity. What was interesting about this experiment was that not all of the paints reacted the same way. Many layered as expected, with very little color mixing and with the bottom layers showing subtly through the top layer. Interestingly, some of the colors almost repelled the others, almost the way soap would repel water. It will be something to keep in mind as I start creating compositions in my sketchbook.
With both of these opportunities to just play, I would say I am not thrilled with my bamboo brushes. They do not seem to hold their shape as much as I would like and they are a bit cumbersome for the way I like to paint, which is quite controlled. I haven’t completely given up on them yet, and will see if my opinion changes as I practice with them more. Overall, I am excited to start creating some compositions in my sketchbook using these watercolors. I am excited about the vibrant colors especially as we move into spring and summer.