 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy, online artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm going to talk about three liquid watercolor brands today pH Martens, which I've had for a long time Avery Elwitscher new and Hero Arts Witscher new so first the Hydrus pH Martin watercolors. They're in one ounce glass bottles. I have 36 colors I don't know if they have more but they have three sets of 12 They come in this glass bottle and you can take the dropper out You can put color into any kind of palette You can also dip your brush directly in there if you'd like and these are really strong colors as you can see The palette that I decided to put these in is a 36 color palette from Tim Holtz It's supposed to be for alcohol inks, but I decided to try it with these and I made swatch cards for each one of the colors with the solid color in the Hexagon and then a gradated color out from each one There's going to be still pictures of each one of these on my blog if you want to Check those out and be able to see what kind of colors there are etc There's some colors that granulate etc, and this is an old chart I'll also post it has labels and stuff that will be on it That shows you the three sets if you want to decide between which set to get and then this is the key that I created that goes with this palette so you can see the brightness of the colors and I did make a Color name little thing there for myself, and I will super impose that on the blog as well So you can see that one the new Avery L ones come in the little ink reinker size bottles So that's how big they are there the half ounce plastic bottles. There's 10 colors right now There might be more colors I don't know but I got the 10 colors and there as I said these little plastic bottles You can't dip anything into them, but you can squeeze them out into a palette And I have this little round palette that has perfectly 10 wells for my every else This is the colors they have what you're really interesting. They're a lot lighter There's a whole bunch of really pale colors, which are quite beautiful. They go with a lot of their inks so they'll coordinate well if you have a lot of Avery L inks for stamping and They do water out nicely. They're they're gorgeous colors And then I of course took a look at the third set Which is from Hero Arts and there are eight colors of this at least known to me right now And they come in half ounce glass bottles Remember the pH Martins were were a full ounce. These are half ounce and they have a little dropper on the top So you can put some into a palette like I have done here in one of the 10 well palettes There are eight colors. You could also dip a brush directly in there Not a big fat brush, but you can dip a even up to a number 12 or 14 brush into directly into that and Of course, I made the same kind of color swatch charts brighter colors more intense more primary feeling colors And there is a brown here. There was not a brown in the Avery L There is one art print brown in this set So here are the three groups of colors together so you can see them for comparison The paler ones the Avery L on the left the hero in the middle and on the right-hand side is pH Martins So 10 colors 8 colors and 36 colors. I Find them all particularly nice The only ones that get any granulation are the pH Martins. The others don't seem to have any granulation in them I used basically the same truck same type of technique for painting all of these as solid the hexagon shapes With straight-up color, so you're gonna get more colors with one and less colors than another if you like softer colors Go for the Avery L if you like the stronger colors the hero arts and if you like strong color and broad selection then pH Martins So I like them all for different reasons and what I decided to do was you know me I don't like to just make swatch cards in order to test anything out I did do a bunch of other tests, but I only am sharing this one Little card with you because I'm gonna do it with all three sets and just get some color comparisons for how these worked out So with the Avery L really soft beautiful colors I'm just gonna make a couple stripes of a few colors on a piece of Watercolor paper. This is Arches cold press And I think I had a little bit of that green left on That one because that that color isn't it's mimosa and it's a little bit brighter than that probably Yeah, I think I still had some color left on my brush But you can see they just come out really soft and beautiful. They go on nicely They are their decent watercolors I think all all three sets are and they're in just in different ways that you'd want to apply them and and use them I would recommend if you Haven't tried liquid watercolors and you want to try them out Then pick the ones with the colors that you like best because I think they operate the same way You can decide whether you like the glass bottle or the plastic bottle better and Whether or not you want to have a full ounce or a half an ounce For most people half an ounce is possibly gonna be quite plenty and you may find that you'll rebuy another half ounce of your favorite colors and You won't need to rebuy the others if you buy something like the one ounce bottles You're gonna end up getting a full ounce of everything even the colors You don't use there are some colors in the pH Martens that I'm not sure that I've ever actually used other than to put them in my swatch charts So that was the hero arts and then here we go with the pH Martens so you can see the colors are much brighter I'm even trying to add a little bit of water to them that the one difference between these and the other two Is they seem some of the colors seem a little bit I'm not sure if I'd say thicker or if it's simply a factor that I've had these pH Martens for several years and some of them might be evaporating a little bit over time as I've used them The fact of having them in a pallet doesn't really make a whole lot of difference Other than if you put anything in a pallet and It dries and you want to reuse it if you add more water to it to reconstitute it Which you can you're adding more water to it Just know that so that if you're trying to get full strength color Go from full strength color out of the bottle right away and don't mix it with water But if these were to run out or to dry up and I want to spray them and wet them they'll be possibly a little lighter as I paint them and That sort of thing these are all wet water colors right now, but some of them just feel thicker I mean look at that that blue that just feels thicker to me Not that it's thick. It's still liquid watercolor. It's still not a tube watercolor It's just a lot more pigment going on then in some of the others potentially But there you go With all the strong color from the pH Martens I decided to see if I could make them do the Avery L type color So I'm going to mix yellow ochre and raw sienna to try to match mimosa a Little bit of quinacridone violet really soft to try to do that purple color and the The mint did there's not really a whole lot here blue aqua may be dulled down a little bit So I'm going to try it and see what happens with any water colors You can do this you can add more water to them to lighten them up and you can mix them all together All of these brands seem to mix together just fine. I haven't found any issues with it yet but The only issue with the Avery L that I'll mention that you may want to know is that there's no brown in the Avery L There is going to be a video coming up in I think a week I have to check on what date it's going to actually happen, but if you subscribe to Ellen Hudson's channel I think it's going to be over there in a week showing you how to make a brown color Out of the colors that they have because if there's no brown What do you do if you need brown because you know I do animals and things and I need browns So I will show you how to do that is possible But you can also split your brands you can mix from one brand into another and buy one color in one thing one color in another Except for these ph Martins Ellen sells them in the 12 packs So you have to get 12 at a time But when you break it down to per ounce, they are the least expensive. So there you go You just have to buy 12 at once. That's all So the the brownish color kind of worked okay, but since I had to mix it It is a little bit duller than the mimosa The quinacridon violet is brighter than the what's it called sugar plum? I think is what it's called in the Avery L that purple color and then I wanted to mix something that was going to work for that mint colors I'm really rinsing out my brush off-screen really really well because I didn't want to contaminate it But I grabbed some of that and like look at how intense that color is so add some more water to it And then I'm going to dull it down with a little bit of that quinacridon violet And see if I can kind of make it match a little bit better because it's so bright and Even with that mixed together. It's still really bright. So I added a little bit of water to it to try to soften it down and If I worked at it, I'm sure I could probably get them to match pretty darn well But you see the kinds of things you can do with any of these colors Now after I finished with all these I left them sitting out overnight and they all dried So you can actually pick them up and move them around you can reconstitute them with water Just remember if you reconstitute with more water you may be watering the color down a little bit and In general if you're using them lightly, it's not going to matter a whole lot Now let's finish off making the cards. I'm going to use this die set from Concord & 9th It's got a just and a because and I'm going to use the the Little just with the big script because and then the leaves on these so I think the leaves are really pretty so I've busted out my dies and I'm going to tape them on and Create a little focal point on the kind of left third I guess of each one of these cards and I'll use the different leaves on them and I have a border die from Mft. It's like you probably see it a lot. You're probably getting tired of seeing it's a little stitch die and I Was really fast that die cutting wasn't I the because I put some Be creative tape on the back of some watercolor paper so that I could make this a sticker and not have to put Adhesive all over the back of that thing So it worked out pretty well. Just got to get rid of the little openings in each one of my letters by poking them out with my little pokey tool I Think it's called a craft pick, but I called a pokey tool because it pokes. That's its job So then I'll add each one of those and pop them up onto a card base To allow some of that depth to show through and it's a nice just because card So this is the Avery L colors remember the nice intensity there And this is the pH Martin's replica of it So similar but different if you didn't see them next to each other you'd probably like them both the same but there you go This is the hero arts colors much brighter more intense color but again, I didn't try to water them down you could soften them as well and Then this is the pH Martin's with nearly full strength Trying to really carry the full strength of the color So there we go, I think each one is equal It depends on what kind of colors you like and which kind of bottle you like and whether you want the full ounce Oh half ounce bottle. So how's that for non committal? I love them all. I always love all the colors I'll talk to you guys later. Bye