Jackson's watercolor

“hi in this video i'm going to talk about my experience with jackson's watercolor if you're not familiar with jackson's they are a huge art supply store based in the uk with a great online shopping site that ships worldwide their store brand watercolors are made for them by sennelier an oem style service that just means sennelier's factory in france manages the production of these paints it does not mean that there are no differences between the two brands even though they both share many overlapping colors i did notice that some of the color names that overlap between them are listed as using different pigment ingredients this is likely due to a typo error though and i'll elaborate more on that in a minute before i get too far into my observations regarding jackson's watercolor i will say that they are acceptable for use as a professional grade watercolor my goal here is not to suggest that you buy or not buy them but rather to make sure you are informed before deciding they are definitely not the worst option out there they do have some limitations though and do not meet my personal artistic needs someone interested in subtle layering such as for realistic botanical art florals an artist not concerned about accurate pigment information may appreciate these paints more than i did i'm showing colors from my first purchase at the start of this video but i'll be adding a few more pans and tubes for evaluation later in the video last year i set up a little primary mixing palette from full size pants and light fast tested them so i could be confident in any work i sell using them they also offer half pans and tubes that come in 10 or 21 ml size using the same tube packaging as sennelier with different sticker overlays if you're determined to try these paints i would start with a small mixing set like this just to see if you like the paint properties before investing in more colors because both jackson zencenellier make unusually salt reactive smooth particle ultramarine blues that is not my preferred representation of its typical texture and color separating properties i felt that phthalo blue was the superior versatile option for color mixing i chose cadmium yellow because it's a very strong economical pigment with reliable light fastness but the opacity can look a little cloudy in layers so py 154 or py3 might be a good alternative if you want to avoid opaque colors i would skip past other primary yellows jackson's offers like oriolen py40 and indian yellow with py83 as those pigments can discolor or fade over time when purple pr122 is an ideal primary cool red option but if you notice that it's marked as only fair light fastness online it's because sennelier provides an outdated astm lf3 rating but they also celebrate pr 122 at three of three stars which is more accurate unfortunately this jackson's color is notably less pigmented and requires a bit of extra scrubbing with a wet brush to reach the same saturation as its sennelier counterpart i've read that their pan and tube formulas are different and here it seems like the pan had a lot more binder than their other colors i used up more of this color than expected putting a pretty big dent in the pan just from swatching which usually only happens when working with a student grade pigment load my sennelier version of pr122 called helios purple was much easier to re-wet but the tube version does dry pretty sticky in self-port pans that's not ideal for travel but it released more saturated color and also flowed or dispersed across wet washes more easily for rounding out a limited pallet i also added quinn gold and payne's gray which allows me to more easily achieve floral greens and dark shadow colors jackson's quinn gold was labeled with incorrect pigment information carelessly copy pasted from sennelier's uncommon mixture for the color called gold ochre this was really frustrating for me both as a paint reviewer and as a consumer multiple colors resulted in many investigations just to be able to swatch and label the pigment so they can be properly compared to other brands colors like quinn gold and cobalt violet dp had so many errors that not only did the pigments on my paint labels differ from jackson's website but they also differed from sennelier's listed pigments i literally ended up with three different sets of information for the same color this is pretty bad because these particular colors were actually exact matches when swatched side by side meaning that either jackson's or sennelier or both are passing along carelessly written ingredient lists this results in undisclosed pigments being present in paints which is basically false advertising and misleading to the artist buying them when shopping around the first thing you might notice is that jackson's paints are more affordable than sennelier despite that lower cost many of their paints are priced at or above the cost of white nights which is a very competitive brand alternative to keep in mind for consideration i suspect that there are a few reasons for the price difference between sennelier and jackson's many of my pans were filled to notably different levels which definitely feels sloppy compared to other brands while many manufacturers pour their paints to give you a nice evenly filled pan sennelier and jackson's have a dehydrated extruded and cut method which is cut poorly at messy angles this results in very loose colors that rattle around in the pan easily fall out and in some instances i've had undercuts resulting in about 25 percent less paint than i would have received from another brand be aware that sennelier offers 98 colors and jackson's currently offers just 43 apparently shrinking down from a previous 48”