Monday 1 January 2018

Wallace Seymour The Four Humours

Happy New Year and welcome 2018! 




I have just updated my last post about Wallace Seymour Artists Watercolours, and shown a few of the Vintage Watercolours. The other product that was mentioned in the comments and added to the post was The Four Humours - 18C Watercolour Life Drawing Set, shown here.

I bought this set in Manchester during the 2016 USk Symposium and had a little play with it. It is not an easy set to get started with - you need to wet with hot water and scrub with a firm brush to activate for the first time and it takes some doing to get them to release the colour. Once you do, you have a red earth, a yellow earth and grey and a creamy white. 

Pip (Wallace) Seymour Four Humours

 While I found the set charming, it wasn't really practical so I broke off a bit of each colour (I am not suggesting this was a good idea but the black was rather broken!) and put it in a full pan and attempted to rewet it. Rather like the Vintage tubes, it wasn't easy to do. However I have read glowing reviews of this set so perhaps used as intended straight from the hand-made rounds would have been a better idea.


I love exploring new materials and ideas. While they may not all suit me, others may enjoy reading about them and adding their own comments below. Life would be far less interesting if we all loved exactly the same things!

Happy painting :-)

2 comments:

  1. Jane, I love reading your reviews, they open a whole new world to me. I am still struggling to make swatches as beautiful as yours. To be honest, I am not really interested in trying to learn to paint ‘things,’ beautiful, realistic landscapes, animals, or vases of flowers, for instance. I would ‘just’ like to be able to harness the intrinsic qualities of watercolours to make pure abstracts or abstracted rendition of what I see. This journey is daunting but revelatory, an exciting adventure.
    Thank you for sharing your explorations!

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    1. I sometimes wonder if I spend more time making swatches than paintings but I do still find them fascinating - I still come across something new every now and then that just makes me smile. I've done a number of abstract watercolours, exploring the interaction of different pigments. It certainly is an adventure :-)

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