I love HimI gouache! I personally have no trouble using it, I love the consistency, price and vibrancy. A few colours are more lightfast but overall and most are Not lightfast so I use them for personal work, scanned art and sketchbook art. But much where I live in Canada it’s 11 times cheaper than Holbein and I only like Holbein 1.5 times as much so basic math! I also paint WAY more now as HimI is so reasonably priced. Also I mix custom colours in empty half/full pans and rewet them. I also increase the colour quality with dr. Ph martens Hydrus and tube watercolours. As well as just mixing HimI together with each other. I keep labels and notes. Here are a few custom mixed recommendations Neutral blue = acid blue +cobalt blue (about 50/50) Golden joy= 50% earth yellow 20% ochre 30% medium yellow Vibrant black mix = 50% umber 50% ultramarine Also consider drying and resetting with an eye dropper (and wait ) this changes the consistency. I use it wet from the cups and dried out and rewet. I also use watercolour under and mixed in with HimI gouache! You can mix a bit of HimI in with regular watercolour btw. I advise mixed media. If using more like other traditional gouache I advise resetting from dry!
Oooh great ideas! I’ll have to try and dry and reset it that’s a great idea - I can imagine that might give it a little more opacity in that dryer form
I'm one of those people who don't like Himi gouache. I'm trying to use it up, still, while sketchbooking, but it's not easy!! I have a lot of professional gouache now, and for sketchbook work, if I'm trying to keep costs down, I would recommend Arteza gouache over Himi, hands down. But hey, for everyone out there who loves it, great!! Use the supplies you like. Your tools aren't supposed to make you suffer. 😁
Excellent demo. Thanks for making it so informative too. They just sent me a set too. I was posting my demo with it today haha Loved seeing yours. Always excited to see you post.
Himi gouache was one of the first gouaches I ever used and I like it better than those more expensive brands it really is the perfect starting set for people who want to start to get into gouache ❤❤❤
Thank you for going into so much detail on how it differs from traditional gouache. Understanding the differences is important when trying to understand what other artists are able to accomplish with a particular medium.
I had such a visceral reaction the first time I worked with himi, the consistency made me angry and I’ve never had that happen with any art supply before. Kudos to those who enjoy it though, the palette is great at least!
@@JustinDonaldsonArt its been a while but if I remember correctly I hated how it blended , if you don’t want patchy brush strokes you have to thin it to the point it’s transparent…I like working the most with a medium thickness and opacity and that seems to be where himi is the worst consistency, it’s so streaky and patchy and unblendable
I second that! What I found frustrating about Sarah Burns' gouache comparison video is that she was judging everything by her preferred gouache and her style of painting. And no shade to her! She was very comprehensive in discussing the qualities of all the different brands. But she ended up saying the Himi and the Caran d'ache cakes are really inferior, which I don't think is really fair. They are different, and need to be used in a different way - and it's totally fine to prefer one to another. But I appreciate reviews like Justin's that point out the differences and how you should adjust accordingly. I feel like that's more balanced.
Excellent video! I’ve always wanted to see a gouache landscape artist such as yourself review this! I remember really liking himi gouache when I first tried them. I think my only issue really was with the white paint and how strange they made the other colors look when mixed. But this was in the early days when himi was first released so maybe they’ve changed the formula since. Anyway I really liked hearing your thoughts on this product!
I remember buying books on gouache painting and always being disappointed by the amateurish quality of art and the general chalkiness of the paint. What I didn't realise was that the authors had no idea how to use gouache, to save the white for overpainting highlights, instead of mixing it all over the place. And their portraits were terrible. Most of the great American magazine and industrial illustrators of the 40s through to the 60s used it to brilliant effect. But hobbyist painters had no clue because there were no books on how to use the medium properly.
I started painting with Himi gouache before switching over to WN/Holbein. I’m not sure if it’s because I was a beginner at the time, but I hated how transparent it was and how unnatural the colors looked. There was just no opacity even when adding the white. It’s probably a mix of my inexperience and the quality, but It’s a good set for beginners especially with the price, and I’m glad I tried it out before realizing I loved the medium and spending more on quality paints.
@@mesolithicman164 they’re very similar. I’ve found that WN can feel a littttttle less pigmented and more flowy, while Holbein feels like you need to add more water to it, but the pigment is more concentrated. They’re similar prices where I live, in the US, so i usually just grab whatever’s available.
@@cheesecube420 Thanks. That's very interesting. Perhaps when you get to the top tier brands there are all good but with slight variations in useability.👍👍🎅
That was a very nice intelligent review of Himi. A very diplomatic approach to the limitations of this media. I'm going to say that really this is for beginners, to get them started, because if you want to really exploit gouache you need very good quality paint. And I say that as someone who has tried to cut corners costwise and ended up paying more for my frugality! That is my mea culpa. Bottom line, buy artists quality, just a few key colours and expand your palette if you enjoy them and want to pursue the medium.
I have this exact set and I love it, even tho I´m not yet very good at using it. I´t s a lot of fun to just paint and experiment with it. It helped me to loosen up and just embrace stuff with brush strokes and more artistic style than my usual highly realistic, fully rendered art. It´s funny that you are saying it dries slowly... my complaint is that it dries so damn FAST, even on the palette. That being said, I don´t have experience with regular guache and am only experimenting for this for a week, did 5 paintings in total. I´m a digital artist who occassionally works with oils, so that´s why the drying time is too fast for me, but overall a great experience, and the very much needed change of pace
Haha that’s interesting - do you live somewhere dry and hot? It’s amazing how much the environment moisture changes the experience of painting with gouache
great demo! really enjoyed your more technical explanations of how the thicker body affects dry time and difficulty in placing detail, which can lead to muddiness. a lot of people just end by saying the consistency is icky or goopy thus bad hahaha
Hi Justin, thank you for this video! I started out on himi after coming from watercolor and it was revolutionary for me with the opaqueness to the iridescent, so much freedom. However I’d recently bit the bullet and bought Nicker poster color and I will never go back to himi! While I appreciate himi, Nicker I noticed gives smoother blends, less streakiness and is almost easier to use or get it what I want to do. It has given me more confidence since switching from himi. I’d be curious to know your opinion compared to Nicker poster color too. Thank you!!
@@JustinDonaldsonArt You saying nicker wins hands down is so validating haha. I researched so much on it in comparison to himi but there wasn’t really anything out there talking about it. I just had to take the plunge and it was the most pleasant surprise! Lol. Thanks so much
Do you have a preferred brand of gouache? You mentioned that the HIMI paint was lacking in opacity, but from what I understand, many of the artist grade gouaches, eg M Graham and Holbein, are also slightly transparent because they don’t add opacifiers
They are all slightly transparent + will always turn more transparent with extra water - I suppose the question is how much paint is needed for it to be opaque and at what level of extra water will it become transparent. Different pigments are different too- lemon yellow is notoriously transparent in all paint types 😅. I really like Windsor and newton, m. Graham + nicker postercolour.
I am constantly having to spray water on these paints as I'm using them. They dry to fast here in Arizona since we have low humidity and sometimes I feel like I am painting with colored tacky glue. I would like a cloud tutorial with these though. I've studied your art and lessons and I really want to see how you would tackle the challenges Himi Gouache has.
Oooh that tacky glue texture sounds so amazingly unappealing!! Yeah, I have had a few students in that geographical area and they have a real hard time. If you haven’t tried yet, it might be worth exploring putting down a wet towel/wet surface underneath so that it constantly feed water up and allows you to paint for a little longer.
JUSTIN, MY DUDE, you could paint beautifully with colored mud, I am not sure I buy an endorsement from you of any particular brand of paint... but nice work. My experience with Himi is that it is not as enjoyable to work with as a higher quality brand 🤷♂
I just started gouache, i bought W&N, and then himi for more practice. But I find it so difficult to use! I like WN, cause I have been painting with watercolours for a while, so i still use the same techniques for gouache.
I hated it. I thought maybe it was gouache as a medium that I hated, but when I purchased some student grade Caran D'Ache, the difference was astounding. The consistency is terrible and dries so streaky and chalky. Caran D'Ache is much more flexible and forgiving and so much easier to use. I ended up giving the set to my toddler niece because I knew she'd have fun with it no matter what.
I have this exact set and I love it, even tho I´m not yet very good at using it. I´t s a lot of fun to just paint and experiment with it. It helped me to loosen up and just embrace stuff with brush strokes and more artistic style than my usual highly realistic, fully rendered art. It´s funny that you are saying it dries slowly... my complaint is that it dries so damn FAST, even on the palette. That being said, I don´t have experience with regular guache and am only experimenting for this for a week, did 5 paintings in total. I´m a digital artist who occassionally works with oils, so that´s why the drying time is too fast for me, but overall a great experience, and the very much needed change of pace