INTENSE COLOR, EFFORTLESS FLOW
With just a few drops of water, you can make bold, saturated marks on wet or dry paper. To make typical, translucent watercolor washes, you'll need to add more water than you might expect. Most Tonic colors start out semi-opaque because of their high pigment load, but they open up with water, becoming light and subtle as they're diluted.
At any concentration, Tonic is free-flowing. It's easy to load onto a wet brush, easy to lift from its pan or from paper, and easy to move the brush across watercolor paper. Some brands of watercolor are too sticky or slow-moving to allow painting on dry paper, but with Tonic, you don't need to pre-wet the page for most techniques.
OUR EXTRA-LARGE PORCELAIN PAN
This is our signature package for Tonic Watercolor — a large, hand-poured porcelain pan containing 20 grams of solid watercolor. That's approximately seven times the net weight of a typical half pan of watercolor paint! With its huge size and affordable price, Tonic is one of the absolute best-value products in fine art materials today.
Plus, when you're done using a Tonic pan, you can easily wash out the porcelain dish for use as a palette — or, to refill with your favorite large tube of watercolor.
Tonic Porcelain Pans measure 45 mm (1.8") in diameter and 19 mm (0.75") in height.
MADE WITH FINE ACACIA GUM
One element of our recipe is highly traditional: we use specially sourced and carefully tested gum arabic as the binder for Tonic watercolors. Gum arabic, which is the plant-based medium of virtually all watercolors, varies wildly in quality and consistency. As we learned over dozens of materials tests, some grades and species of gum arabic are totally unsuitable for watercolor. Some are merely acceptable. The best-quality gum arabic (which is what we use in Tonic) offers incredible transparency, flexibility, and handling. That's why our Tonic Watercolor Medium is noticeably clearer than many of the other brands on the market.
LIGHTFAST, MODERN PIGMENTS
All Tonic colors are lightfast, with ratings of 7 or 8 on the eight-point Blue Wool Scale. Paintings made with Tonic colors are suitable for commissioned work and for long-term display under appropriate gallery conditions.
NO ANIMAL PRODUCTS
We're pleased to let you know that Tonic contains no animal-derived products. Unlike many watercolors, Tonic does not contain ox gall — instead, we use modern surfactants to achieve the same effects as the traditional animal-derived recipe.