Kuretake Gansai Tambi Granulating Colors Set 2 "Cosmic" Review: Testing it against my house portrait workflow
Heya, this is Hat Ho Dao,
I've had the Gansai Tambi Granulating Colors Set 2, the "Cosmic" set, in my palette for a good while now. Long enough that it's stopped feeling like a new toy and started feeling like a tool I actually reach for on purpose, which is really the only review that matters to me. I wrote about the Aurora set a while back, and a few people asked how Cosmic compares, so this time I want to go color by color and actually show my work.
A quick refresher on why granulation matters to me
I paint house portraits and I do a lot of urban sketching, and my process is almost always ink first, then watercolor on top. Granulating colors separate as they dry instead of sitting as one flat wash, so a single pass can already suggest stone, bark, moss, or old paint without me rendering every bit of it by hand. That's the whole appeal, and it's why I keep adding more granulating sets instead of stopping at one.
Quick overview: what's in the Cosmic set
Five colors, plus an empty pan for mixing or diluting:
- Cosmic Red (No. 776)
- Cosmic Olive (No. 777)
- Cosmic Green (No. 778)
- Cosmic Blue (No. 779)
- Cosmic Violet (No. 780)
Same large, shallow Gansai Tambi pans as Aurora, same easy loading, same quick activation with a pre-wet. What's different is the palette itself, and the character of the granulation in each color is different too, which is really what this post is about.
The first thing that stood out: this set leans earthy, not bright
Aurora reads like an accent palette to me. Red, pink, orange, blue, violet, all colors that want to be noticed. Cosmic is quieter. Olive and green pull the whole set toward what actually grows and weathers around a house: ivy, moss, shaded grass, faded trim, the kind of color you only half-notice until it's missing from a painting.
Color by color: how each one behaves and where I use it
Cosmic Green (No. 778)
This is the color I reach for without thinking. Wet into wet, it breaks apart into darker green specks sitting in a lighter green pool, which already reads as individual leaf clusters before I've touched a brush to detail work. I use it for overgrown front yards, climbing vines on brick, and hedges along a fence line. Diluted, it's a believable shaded lawn. Picked up more directly, it's dense foliage crowding a doorway. The only place I hold back is right next to ink lines I want to stay crisp, since the granulation can creep slightly past the edge of the wash if the paper is too wet.
Cosmic Olive (No. 777)
My favorite discovery in this set, and the color that's genuinely new to my palette rather than a different version of something I already owned. It sits in that narrow, hard-to-mix space between green and brown, which happens to be exactly the color of old render, weathered wood siding, or a roof that's been through a few seasons. The granulation here is softer and more even than the Green, less "speckled," more like a gentle tonal drift. I use it as a base wash on aging walls before I add any shadow, and it holds up well under a second glaze without turning muddy.
Cosmic Blue (No. 779)
This one does a similar job to Aurora Blue: cool shadows, cooler notes in pavement or stonework nearby. But the granulation pattern feels slightly different, a bit more clustered and blotchy rather than Aurora Blue's finer texture. I've found it works well for overcast sky washes behind a house, and for cooling down a shadow that would otherwise feel too warm next to Cosmic Olive. It's less useful on its own as a ground texture the way Aurora Blue was for me, so I treat it more as a shadow and sky color than a surface color.
Cosmic Violet (No. 780)
Deep shadow corners, under eaves, inside doorways, same role as Aurora Violet. Honestly, after this much use, I treat the two violets as close enough that I just use whichever one is already wet on my palette that day. If I'm being picky, Cosmic Violet granulates a touch darker at full strength, so it's slightly better for the deepest, almost-black corners where I don't want any warmth creeping in.
Cosmic Red (No. 776)
Still a strong-accent-only color for me, same as Aurora Red. Doors, small signage, a single focal point, maybe a flag or an awning. It's too dominant to use across any large area of a building, and the granulation doesn't add much value at that scale anyway since I'm usually applying it as a small, fairly flat shape. This is the color in the set I use the least, simply because my paintings don't call for a lot of bold red.
After living with both sets for a while, I've stopped asking which one is better and started thinking of them as two different jobs. Aurora is my ground-and-stone set: pavement, driveways, old walls, that dry textural quality. Cosmic is my growth-and-age set: foliage, moss, weathered wood, the softer organic texture that creeps around the edges of a building. Keeping both on hand means I can match the texture to the surface instead of forcing one palette to do everything, which was always my complaint with flat watercolor in this kind of work.
If I had to pick just one for house portraits specifically, I'd lean toward Cosmic slightly more often, simply because most houses have more green and weathered surface around them than bare stone. But I wouldn't want to give up either set at this point.
One more thing before I go
The third Gansai Tambi granulating set has just been released, part of Kuretake's 20th anniversary for the line. It's a different idea again: moon-inspired colors that glow under blacklight. I haven't tested it myself yet, so I won't pretend to have an opinion, but I'm curious enough that I'll probably pick it up and keep this granulating series going on the blog.
If you've been slowly building your own granulating watercolor collection the way I have, you can find the Gansai Tambi sets and the rest of what I paint with in the shop.