Artistry by Altenew 2023 Watercolor Tubes Release Blog Hop + Giveaway ($300 in Total Prizes!)

Hello, friends! I am very excited to be part of today’s Altenew Artists’ Watercolor Tubes September 2023 Release Blog Hop! You should have arrived here from SathyaKala, and your next stop is Bridget. You can also start at the beginning at the Altenew blog! Altenew has become synonymous with “fabulous artist mediums” to me, and until this point, my favorite medium was the marvelous Artists’ Watercolor 24 Pan set. But now, I have a new favorite: Palette Perfection Watercolor Tubes! I have loved and used watercolor tubes for a long time, preferring to put them in pans and allow them to dry out so that I can create a custom watercolor palette.

So what makes these Palette Perfection Watercolor Tubes different from the other Altenew Artist Mediums? Well, these are considered to be “artist grade.” This means that the pigment is more highly concentrated, allowing for a higher level of vibrancy, as well as allowing the color to last longer. Other, more inexpensive watercolors contain more fillers than pigment, which allows them to have higher volume but lower pigment value. In addition, these watercolors are considered to have a good lightfast rating, meaning that your painting will not fade if properly cared for!

In order to create my Palette Perfection Watercolor Tubes palette, I first laid out my pans and put the tube colors in rainbow order. I always number my pans so that when I create my swatch chart, I can accurately label which color goes in which pan. This allows me to add more color if and when I run out! Though as with almost all good quality watercolor pans, a small amount of dried watercolor will last for a very long time because of the highly concentrated pigment. That the colors will last for a very long time is one of the reasons that I put them in pans to dry them out. The colors react almost immediately with water, and this allows you to easily create unique colors by mixing and matching your individual watercolors on your palette of choice!

After I had numbered all of my half pans and created the coordinating swatch card (I simply sized it to fit inside the lid of the Altenew Watercolor Tin Case), I filled each half pan with the coordinating watercolor. Filling each half pan took a little bit less than half of each of these 8 mL tubes. I placed them on an inexpensive cookie sheet that I purchased a the dollar store, then placed the pan high on a shelf to allow them to dry. I allowed them to sit for a few days, then after the colors had settled and dried, added a bit more watercolor to those pans that were not completely full. After another couple of days, I was ready to add my watercolor rainbow to the Watercolor Tin Case! I am so happy to have more room in the case to add more colors as they’re released.

After I had put all of my Palette Perfection Watercolor Tubes colors in their respective pans and allowed them to dry sufficiently, I swatched each of the colors on my swatch card that fits perfectly in the lid of the pan case. After swatching, I was very intrigued by the Opera Lemon color, particularly, as I’ve been using very diluted bright yellow to add highlights and to mix in with other colors to create unique colors with that bright yellow undertone. I used another scrap of watercolor paper to mix the Opera Lemon with other colors in the palette. The addition of the neon yellow really creates such interesting color mixes! I was especially intrigued by the combination of Dark Cyan and Opera Lemon, and so I decided to use those two colors as the background for my floral watercolored panel.

For this project, I selected one of the no-line watercolor panels from the Watercolor Coloring Book. I wasn’t sure what colors I wanted to use for the flowers themselves, so I started by taping my panel down to my watercolor board and using Dark Cyan, Phthalo Blue, and Opera Lemon with the largest of the Fine Watercolor Brushes by Artistry by Altenew to create this colorful background wash, filled with lots of vibrant color. I just love those pops of the neon yellow peeking out from behind the blue and green watercolor. It enlivens the background in a way that I’ve never done before. So fun and different! I did a couple of layers of color to enhance and intensify some of the areas and clean up some of the edges on the flowers themselves, in order to keep the edges nice and crisp.

After watercoloring the background, I added lots of color to the flowers themselves, using Quinacridone Violet and Quinacridone Magenta for the flowers, adding highlights and touching up the edges of the no-line flowers with Titanium White. I also added very diluted washes of Opera Lemon to some of the petals to add interest and brighten them up, making them match the vivid background washes more closely. This panel would be so pretty as a framed piece or as a card!!

Well, that’s all for my project today. You will definitely see more of these beautiful watercolors here on my blog! I am so happy to add another medium to my (ahem, extensive) collection of watercoloring mediums!

Now for some fun giveaway information:

$300 in total prizes! To celebrate this release, ArtistrybyAltenew is giving away ONE $100 gift certificate to 1 lucky winner and a $40 gift certificate to FIVE winners! Please leave a comment on the Altenew Blog and/or each designer’s blog post on the blog hop list below by 10/03/2023 for a chance to win. ArtistrybyAltenew will draw 6 random winners from the comments left on each stop of this blog hop and announce the winners on the Altenew Winners Page on 10/05/2023.
*The winner of the $100 gift certificate will be chosen from comments left on the Altenew blog. 

Here’s the full hop list in case you get lost: