Brand Overview: Rosa Gallery

Brand Overview is a series where multiple posters give their opinions on a brand. Thus far, we have covered Schmincke Horadam, Daniel Smith, Winsor & Newton, Holbein and Roman Szmal.

Rosa Gallery is a professional watercolor brand from Ukraine. Founded in 1996, they produced canvases for artists. Over time they developed more artist products. In 2018 they started selling watercolors. When this blog post is written, they carry 100 watercolors. They frequently release new colors. 

Their binder is gum arabic based. Despite their low price the colors are intense and highly pigmented. They use the same formulation of watercolors in their tubes and pans.

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Our hot takes and favorite colors

Sandra

Where Rosa Gallery really shines, in my opinion, is their most gorgeous granulating and separating colors. In this aspect they are on the same level as Roman Szmal: they are so fun to paint with! They also come up with new fun colors frequently!

Some of their colors lift really easily and are difficult to paint with, when you work in layers. I had this experience with Cadmium Lemon, PY35, and Royal Brown, PBr25. I know that others experienced this too for more than these two colors. I personally have less difficulty with layering the more staining pigments, such as Aureoline, PY150, and the phthalo colors. 

Rosa Gallery watercolors colors are easy to pick up from pans. If they are used daily they get very soft. But not to the extent that they travel out of their pans when stored upside down (at least in an European summer, I don’t know about other climates). 

If you are new to watercolors, this is a fabulous brand to start with. In Europe they are really inexpensive.

Favorite colors:

As they have many colors that I love, I pick the ones that are the most fun for me and not necessarily the ones I use the most. 

• Golden Brown (PY42, PBr7) is a heavily granulating, high tinting brown. It mixes darks with blues and is overall a really useful color for painting nature. I carry it on my travel palette. [Buy Golden Brown]
• Magenta Grey (PR122, PG17) is a fun muted and granulating pink. I like to use it for loose florals. Dried, it looks similar to Perylene Violet (PV29) but it certainly feels denser when painting with it. [Buy Magenta Grey]
• Jade Green (PY42, PB28, PBk7) is a muted granulating blue-green. I love its texture for leaves in loose florals. [Buy Jade Green]
• Cobalt Brown (PG26, PR108) looks like rocks and stone. The granulating texture shows the green that looks like moss. [Buy Cobalt Brown]

Colors to avoid:

• Cadmium Lemon (PY35) and Royal Brown (PBr25), (see text above) if you like to use a lot of layers. And other colors may lift that easily too. 
• Cobalt Turquoise (PB28) is weak and chalky. Compared to other Cobalt Turquoises it’s no fun to paint with.
• Quinacridone Gold (PY151, PY42, PR264) is not comparable to other brands. Usually, it’s based on the pigment Nickel Azo Yellow, PY150, which gives this color a glow. Rosa Gallery’s version is much duller. It doesn’t have the glow. And on top of it, it looks much more orange, comparable to Quinacridone Burnt Orange (PO48).

Jessie

I tried Rosa Gallery on a whim, thinking it’s so cheap, how good could it possibly be? At the time I was starting out painting with student grade paint. Rosa Gallery advertised itself as artist grade—for less cost than the student grade I was using.

I ended up liking it so much, I now paint with it everyday. Is it the best paint in the world? No. But it’s pretty good and the price is great. 

Pros: bright colors, very clear and vibrant. Makes wonderful mixes, with strong granulating colors. The transparent colors are really transparent! The paint rewets easily and has a high pigment load.

Cons: The paint’s consistency is a little bit sticky? I don’t love this. Some of the colors paint out streaky and are hard to get a perfect smooth gradient. And, in my opinion, they just aren’t as nice a quality overall as some more expensive brands, such as Daniel Smith or Schminke Horadam, that I’ve tried since. 

Favorite colors:

• Pyrrol Red (PR254): This one grew on me, it’s super bright, but mixes great floral colors, or earth tones with some ultramarine and orange thrown in. It’s surprisingly versatile! [Buy Pyrrol Red]
• Azo Yellow (PY151): The fresh color of spring daffodils and buttercups, ready to mingle with cobalt green or other paint friends to create stunning, glowing bright greens or deep foliage tones. This version is smooth, like butter! I love it so much I’m already on my second pan. And not because it’s weak – it is not! This is a bold yellow, and it’s unstoppable. [Buy Azo Yellow]
• Cobalt Green Medium (PG 26): This is a fantastic green. It mixes wonderful foliage shades with PY150. It has such a cool granulation on its own, which is even more pronounced if you throw in some ultramarine blue (PB29 – our color of the year, don’t ya know.) [Buy Cobalt Green Medium]
• Indanthrene Grey (PB60) aka the less popular indanthrone. It has a big drying shift, so expect that, but I love this pigment so much. Rosa’s version is uniquely grey to what I’ve seen. It paints out extremely interestingly, has a huge value range, and the drying shift actually saves me from going too dark too soon. Love, love, love this color, especially for monochromes. [Buy Indanthrene Grey]

Maybe avoid: 

• Cerulean is pretty weak. 
• Also I find the earth tones that I’ve tried in this brand weak and underwhelming.

Lynne

Full disclosure, I’ve just started using Rosa Gallery watercolors and my experience is limited to their set of 12 monopigmented half pans plus a tube of indigo. I purchased the set because I’d heard very good feedback about the quality for the price and because a couple of colors were mentioned repeatedly in blogs I’d read: Magenta Rose, PR122, and Green, PG8. Additionally, that all colors in the set are single pigment paints is a draw to me as that is my palette preference (with the exception being indigo). Now that I’ve tried Rosa I can report that I really like to paint with them. They wet and reset easily, even in my dry winter climate, and the colors flow well and are bright. I plan to purchase tubes as I use up the pans, though I will replace the cadmiums; I prefer not to use those both due to chemical make up and opacity.

Favorite Colors:

• Magenta Rose (PR122) is a beautiful, bright color that is very smooth and easy to work with. It leans pink as opposed to blue, as some PR122 magentas do. It makes great violets and oranges, drops especially nicely into yellows for sunsets and is perfect for florals. [Buy Magenta Rose]
• Green (PG8) is a natural darkish green, leaning more blue than yellow. It’s more transparent than PG26, though similarly granulates and serves as a solid foundation for foliage. It is not considered terribly lightfast, though according to Kim Crick, it fares much better than some pigments like PR177 that are considered fugitive. It will work fine for me in a sketchbook, which is where I do most of my painting. [Buy Green]
• Burnt Sienna (PR101) is minimally granulating, rewets nicely, and is more strongly pigmented than many burnt siennas I have used, either PR101 or PBr7. [Buy Burnt Sienna]
• Indigo (PB15:1, PBk7, PV19) is a wonderful dark neutral for my palette. The three pigment composition is more typical for a Payne’s Grey, but it leans blue, and serves both as a dark blue and neutral as opposed to many Payne’s Greys which are too black for my taste. Indigo is pretty much a staple in my palette, and this is a good one. [Buy Indigo]

Colors to Avoid:

• So far the Burnt Umber is the only color that frustrates me. It’s very hard to rewet and get a decent amount of paint from the pan, and is more golden in hue than I expect from a burnt umber. 
  

Kathryn

I’m primarily familiar with Rosa Gallery through its pans, which I began using in late 2024. To me its virtues are its affordability relative to other pan paints and its unique three-quarters pan size. I primarily pick up to have the pan left over for reuse, and occasionally to try new pigments. In general these paints reactivate and perform well.

My favorites:

My go-tos aren’t necessarily the best versions of these pigments, but they reliably fill in for staples on my palette:

• Flame Red (PO73) – One of the properties I value in PO73 is its uncompromising, unrelenting strength and the Flame Red, while not the strongest I’ve encountered, still delivers. It isn’t a good swap for Transparent Pyrrole Orange (PO71), but it’s great for an intense punch of colour in mass, and a warm glow in dilute. [Buy Flame Red]
• Turquoise (PB15:3/PG7) – it’s a hue, and one commonly available elsewhere, but a pretty and useful mixer all the same. I like it with earth browns, pyrrol orange, pyrrol red and to mix greens. [Buy Turquoise]
• Blue (PB15) – a soft and dark phthalo blue; it’s more red than your typical Phthalo Blue (Green Shade) but not as bright and red as say, Holbein Phthalo Blue (Red Shade) . I find this one less powerful than the Turquoise, and more dull. This becomes a virtue for mixing shadows and sky tones. I found that the mix between this and pyrrol red was good for imitating the dark you can get with cadmium and ultramarine. [Buy Blue]

My avoids:

• Chromium Oxide (PG17) – Though it may be due to the pigment not the formulation, I had a horrible time with this strongly granulating and opaque primadonna. The hue itself is pretty, but I found the colour separation distracting in every mix I tried. I’d compare it to a Mars Black (PBk11) in the way it granulates, maybe not in strength but in how difficult it was to control. It seemingly mixes cleanly with some paints, like Nickel Azo Yellow (PY150), but separates with others, and is difficult to work with. Ultimately, I have condemned this one as a diva.
• Yellow Ochre (PY43/PY42) – It’s a fine semitransparent example, and I don’t mind it, but if I’m being honest with myself I found myself annoyed by how difficult it was to rewet.

Random Considerations:

• I like this brand as an addition to my current palette; I would be unhappy if I had access to nothing else.
• I love Pyrrol Red (PR254). I want to complain that in their pans, it is only available in convenience mixes – “Bright Red” (PO73/PR254) and “Madder Rose” (PV19/PR254). But to be honest…those hues are so gorgeous, I can’t complain. Much. Why add orange, it was already perfect!

Warnings:

• Its main achilles heel for my purposes is the lack of variety in their pigments, and overuse of hues. For example, in pans their quinacridone violet, raw sienna, and all of their blacks are multi pigment mixtures.
• This may not be a good brand for those who are concerned with lightfastness but are not comfortable with pigment codes, especially beginners. This includes knowledge of pigments that are usually LFI/LFII, but occasionally fail. Because I did my reading and watched videos on Rosa Gallery before buying pigments, I knew to avoid many of their reds and violets, and which paints to exercise caution around, such as their fugitive “Green” (PG8). This may be too much of a minefield for some.
• Additionally, many pigments appear to be mislabeled on the packaging, which I would also expect to confuse beginners. I believe this Paynes Grey (see photo above) is meant to list PV19, not PB19, and this Madder Rose is meant to read PR254, not PV254. 

That all said, I’d sum up Rosa Gallery as good value for money, especially if you do your research beforehand. I wouldn’t go out of my way to import it if it isn’t available in your area at the intended price, but its pan paints are all reasonably reliable versions that will behave as you would expect. I look forward to adding to my collection!

Logan

Surprise! I’m jumping on in the editing phase to add my two cents, even though I wasn’t slated to, because I have used Rosa only a little since initially reviewing my first colors from brand six months ago. But nobody has yet mentioned my favorite colors!

My favorite colors:

• Ultramarine Spectral (PB29) is an ultramarine even I, a known Ultramarine hater, can get behind: bold, strong, relatively low granulating for this pigment (similar to Schmincke’s Ultramarine Finest). Plus, the people have spoken, and Ultramarine is the color of the year, so it’s time to get on board! [Buy Ultramarine Spectral]
• Madder Rose (PV19, PR254) is a bright and cheerful pink. PR122 is great, but it can tend toward the purple side of primary; I actually find myself reaching for this happy strawberry pink more often. [Buy Madder Rose]
• Aureoline Green (PY150, PG7) is one of my most-used colors. It’s the equivalent of Daniel Smith’s Green Gold, an example of a mix that’s brighter than the single-pigment equivalent PY129. It is a wonderfully wide-ranging yellow-green that’s great for sunny foliage highlights and as a base for mixing greens. [Buy Aureoline Green]

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