The Roman Szmal Mini Set for Urban Sketchers: an Overly Detailed Review

A few months ago Roman Szmal came out with an eight-halfpan set aimed at urban sketchers, packaged in a smaller version of the usual metal tin. (The tin is also available separately.)

I immediately coveted the tin, and the set, which contains several (well, five) new-to-me colours. That is actually a lot of new colours for someone who owns as much Roman Szmal as I do. Anyway, the palette is very cute, and I could get it very easily–so I did!

Anyway, I am clearly a big Roman Szmal fan. Part of that is patriotism, as I am Polish-born (hence my easy access to their products), but a larger part is that they are awesome, as many existing reviews done by completely non-Polish people will confirm. Basically, they are highly-pigmented and handle nicely, especially if you like your paints dispersive and granulating. And then, as a paint nerd, I particularly love the wide range this brand offers, which includes the classics colours as well as a lot of unusual pigments and some very interesting mixes. Their main downside is that many of the paints are honey-based, and thus poorly suited to humid climates or travel.

Given my extensive Roman Szmal experience, I am clearly qualified to review this palette. I will begin by considering each of the eight colours in the set:

• Nickel Azo Gold (PY150/PR102): A Quin Gold variant, earthy with a bright glow in tints.
• Aquarius Orange (PO N/A): This uses the same strong red-orange pigment as Winsor Newton’s Transparent Orange.
• Quinacridone Red (PV19): A pinkish red that is often used as a magenta in limited palettes. Does not reach very dark values.
• French Ultramarine (PB29): Yep, it’s a highly-granulating Ultramarine!
• Cobalt Sea Blue (PB28): One of my favourites! Granulating and bright. However, it is also opaque and incapable of dark values.
• Autumn Green (PG26/PY150/PR112): A granulating/separating green mix. I love it. I will be showing what it can do below.
• Shadow Violet (PG50/PB29/PV19): One of those popular purply shadow colours. I never use them, so testing this will be interesting.
• Burnt Sienna Brownish (PBr7): Yep, it’s a brownish Burnt Sienna! I tend to like my orange earths to have insane granulation, while this one has mild granulation, so it’s not ideal for me.

Straight away, I see some obvious gaps: there is no bright yellow, no earth yellow, no cyan capable of dark values, and, actually, less granulation than I personally like. Except in the blues: we are doomed to have granulation there! Oh, and there is no ‘sky colour’, but I do not mind as the two blues mix to a cerulean dupe, as I can demonstrate using the following colour chart:

The eight colours in the set are on the diagonal, and I have filled in the square with high-intensity mixes above the diagonal, and tints of those mixes below.

What this chart shows is that yep, there is no clean yellow, but we can get clean bright warm colours, decent purples (PB29/PV19 is decent, right?), a sky blue, many, many earths and neutrals, and a rather large range of textured greens that contains all sorts of olives and blue-greens, but nothing brighly tropical. I think I would also struggle to make a deep dark red. But this is not a botanical palette, but an urban one, so… let’s see how it performs in urban settings! Polish ones, so tropical greens won’t be needed.

All the test paintings below were based on photos taken during a recent trip to Warsaw. One warning: they were all “direct painted”, i.e. I used no under-drawing. There is a “direct painting” challenge on in June that several of my friends are doing, and I felt jealous. (This went much better than I expected!)

Let us begin!

Warsaw has a lot of urban parks, honest! I like this picture, but I also consider it a bit of a failure. Not because of the weird path, but because I wanted a brighter distant glow and darker dark foliage. The former would have been easier with a brighter yellow (even just a pure PY150, although my favourite Szmal yellow is PY151), and the latter, hmm. I ended up making a mess, because my greens and blues were granulating and a bit too liftable. I would have appreciated a phthalo or similar!

Conclusions

As my long series of paintings should prove, I really enjoyed painting with this set. I also love some of the colours in it, like the orange, the rose, and both the blues, and I am clearly obsessed with Autumn Green. However, I am still not crazy about the overall colour selection, because I could not figure out how to work around of the gaps I had immediately noticed. I could handle skies and, with some fiddling, building walls, but I really missed a bright yellow and a strong blue/green.

But that tiny box does have extra space! This is what my palette looks like now. I plan to test it further, then add four more pans. (They will fit once I remove the railing, as I always do.)