Katastrophe Art

There is this a fairly new brand of watercolor from Prima Marketing Inc.
“Prima Confections”

It’s quickly reached the market here in the Philippines, it’s quite cheap for the price of a metal tin with halfpans of paint in it. They are labeled as artist-grade watercolors by the company. I was skeptical. The packaging is clean and dainty, the halfpans are wrapped individually like most brands. I guess they were banking on the experience of unwrapping candy when they were thinking of packaging the set as “Prima Confections.”

I thought the most sensible set to get would be the Tropicals as the Classics includes select colors, particularly white, grey and black which I don’t really use. Meanwhile, the Decadent Pies set include a variations of brown and hues for flesh tones and painting pies as the name suggests I guess.

I originally planned to set aside the half pans and put other colors of my favorite brands in the metal case so I have a smaller palette but when I tried out the colors, I was very much impressed. I was proven wrong in expecting that the colors would be low-grade. In fact, I really like the quality of the paints when I swatched them that I immediately wanted to paint food illustrations with the fun selection of colors.

And it fits my travel brush too!

It’s a good product but I don’t think this is the best selection if you are just starting out with watercolor. It would still be better to get a set with more primaries than anything else. If you are quite iffy with ALWAYS keeping your palette clean, you might not like a metal case as it quickly gets stained.

I imagine any of the sets would be great if you are really collecting different brilliant hues though, or if you are after just a metal case that looks professional- but there are other alternatives like the Pebeo tin which is still cheaper or you can buy other cheaper tins that look different/have different sizes like Reeves or something like this