Recently, I splurged on a pan of 48 beautiful handmade watercolors by A. Gallo. This brand was first discovered during my trip to Montelparro, Italy where I was participating in a painting workshop last summer, and some sets were on sale at the hotel reception. After having bought a small set, so impressed I was that since then, I started adding them to my collection of favorite watercolors alongside Japan’s Kuretake Gansai Tambi and Germany’s Kremer Pigmente. The fact that all the three are handmade and derived from natural pigments appeals to me. The finish and result of A. Gallo are amazing: So concentrated that you only need a little for the paint to go a long way. And the colors! Radiant and vibrant they are, and oh so Italian. See for yourself below! And so I decided to take it to test on 300gsm sheets of Canson’s A4 cold-pressed paper.
Bright Red Tulip
I was originally going to start with painting Little One. However, I realized the available colors on the palettes made it difficult to create skin color. The more I tried, the messier it got. Then rather than discard it, I merely layered it with reds which worked out wonderfully. Did a wet-on-wet method and merged some harmonious colors like vermillion, orange and a bit of violet and watched the colors feather. How cool did that turn out! This same method was repeated with the leaves and stems but with various greens and a bit of yellow. Great start, as I am loving what I see so far!
Green Eyes and Pink Dress
I was so determined to paint Little One though! For the skin color, I cheated a bit and introduced a few shades from Kuretake Gansai Tambi. The rest though was painted in this A. Gallo’s set. Unfortunately, some of the brown from the hair bled into the face, but rather than try and correct that, I left as is. I quite liked that actually. Let’s embrace this as a “beautiful mistake”, as the purpose of this exercise is experimenting, not perfection. The dress turned out very interesting with all the feathering, and wow I love the pink! I further explored the wet-on-wet washes in the background with various hues. White Uni Posca pen was needed to enhance the white areas. How sweet did this turn out!
Faceless Ginger Cat
And now that I have a flower and Little One, why not include an animal to complete the trilogy? I predictably went for a cat of course. And since the color orange had yet to be introduced, let’s make her a ginger cat! And here I played around with the various orange shades along with their harmonious colors of vermillion and yellow. For the body, the shades were a bit darker as the proportion of vermillion/dark orange vs. yellow was larger. The grass was also painted the same method with the green, and to complete the triad color scheme, blue and violet were chosen for the ginger’s collar. Loving that mysteriously feathered effect so much that I decided to skip painting her face. Now how amazing does that look!
And what fun was this experiment! Thoroughly enjoying practicing with waterclors and experimenting with how the colors merge. The color range of this A. Gallo set is also amazing! Although quite pricey, I think it is a good investment and very much recommend it. Look forward to painting more with this set again soon!
My Kawaii Quarter 