Paul Rubens Neon Watercolours Review

Paul Rubens Neon Watercolours contain 14 Opera Series paints. If you are not familiar with opera paints, they are usually not lightfast but offer super vibrant, fluorescent pigments. Don’t look for lightfast information in these paints because there is none! With that in mind, let’s open and see what’s inside.

Fancy Packaging!

I love that like all Paul Rubens paints, the set comes with a swatch card printed on watercolour paper. The box is fancy and sturdy, just like Paul Rubens’ other watercolour sets.

Blinding Colours!

I swatched all 14 shades on the enclosed card. These colours are so vivid and stunning! When I was working with them I had to rest my eyes from time to time.

The paints are not of the same degree of fluorescence, though. The blues (Opera Ultramarine and Opera Blue) are noticeably not neon. Also, all of them are half opaque.

The actual paints look even more neon like when you squeeze them out from the tubes.

I did my first painting with all 14 shades of the Paul Rubens neon watercolours.

On the back of the same paper, I quickly did another loose florals painting. This is super loose to test out the paints so nothing fancy.

For the above, I recreated the Sunset Marsh project from Let’s Make Art without watching the tutorial. The painting was done on Fabriano Studio cold pressed watercolour paper, which is not my favourite, as water tends to dry on it way too fast. In addition, I hated that machine press mark on the paper.

By the way, I was going for that misty effect near the bottom, in case you are wondering. 😛

Cheetahgate

I did one last painting with Paul Rubens Neon Watercolours, inspired by Let’s Make Art’s “cheetah” project. If you haven’t seen it, Sarah Cray’s tutorial addressed the mistake in calling her leopard cheetah. Anyway, I drew my own cheetah but I used rainbow colours just like the tutorial. All of a sudden I am feeling very 80s! 😛

By the way, I also used Payne’s Gray and black from the Paul Rubens 48 watercolour set to mix with Opera Ultramarine for the darkest values.

My Thoughts

These are inexpensive (for the quality) and fun paints. Some are much more neon than others; the ones that are standouts to me are the pinks and oranges. I recommend them as long as you know that these contain fugitive pigments and are not lightfast. They mixed well with regular paints and photograph very well.