New Kind of Watercolors

Watercolor painting is ancient. Water-based paint has been used since neolithic times, notably in ancient Egypt, and also for manuscript illumination in medieval and renaissance times. Like any paint, watercolor is compounded of pigment and a binder, with or without various additives. Various materials have been employed to hold ground pigment particles of course, including resins and sugars. Most watercolors have been compounded with gum arabic as the binder, at least since the beginning of the 19th century. But there is a new kind of watercolor paint out there.

QoR Modern Watercolors

A new kind of watercolor paint, QoR Modern Watercolors is manufactured by Golden. This new watercolor was developed from an art restoring material called Aquazol. I don't know the chemical composition of Aquazol, but it is a water-soluble polymer compound used in art conservation, notably as a reversible adhesive, as filler, or as an inpainting medium. It happened that I saw a conservation video that mentioned using this paint in retouching a wooden sculpture because QoR paints allowed excellent coverage, adhesion, and color. After seeing it used by professional restorers and reading a bit more, I bought several tubes in standard colors--cad yellow light, cad red light, cobalt blue, permanent alizarin, and ivory black. QoR comes in a wide range of colors, including newer, non-toxic pigments.

Hoff, "Foliage," QoR watercolor on paper, 2020

As soon as these new colors arrived I tried them (as you can see in the photo), and was immediately impressed by several properties of the paint. First, as Golden says, QoR has a very heavy pigment load, making the tube paints thicker and richer than others. Second, the high pigment load means brilliant color even after drying--more color than other watercolor paints. Third, because of the high pigment load the resulting paint layer is more opaque, almost like gouache. Fourth, you can reactivate the paint with water very easily.

In the quick study (left) of foliage outside my studio, you can see how layers of color can be made over one another, providing depth and interest, and how the darks are darker and richer than other watercolors. More studies and uses have followed since then, and though there are still only a handful of them, the results have all been similar: brilliant colors, excellent opacity, excellent mixing properties. Overall these are wonderful paints.

One my next projects will be wider use of these intriguing new water paints.