This pocket-sized, affordable set of Schmincke Horadam watercolor offers artists the chance to paint in every color with one of the world’s finest professional-grade paints. Included in the box are six 5 mL tubes, one warm and one cool tone from each primary color family—an absolutely ideal assortment for color mixing.

It’s called the “split primary” or “dual primary” color system, and it allows painters to produce extremely high-chroma secondary colors that can be quite difficult to obtain with traditional mixing sets. Violet, orange, and green are vibrant and beautiful, with several shades of each secondary color available depending on how the primaries are combined.

For our test (pictured above) we painted a quick color wheel using the six Essential Set colors. You can see that each split-primary pair makes the familiar middle primary color when mixed; i.e., cool red and warm red make middle red. Mixing adjacent colors on the wheel produces vibrant secondaries, and mixing colors across the wheel produces pleasing muted tones.

The six colors included are:Warm Red: #341 Geranium RedCool Red: #352 MagentaWarm Blue: #494 UltramarineCool Blue: #479 Helio CeruleanCool Yellow: #215 Lemon YellowWarm Yellow: #213 Chromium Yellow Hue Deep