Testing out Viviva Colorsheets

I kindly received review samples of Viviva Colorsheets that is being funded through IndieGoGo right now, so I took it out on the field to test it out.


This is a little booklet that is very lightweight and fits in my hand, so it definitely is portable.


I made color swatches because there are no mixing area to see how the colors look on white paper. They are painted on Stillman & Birn Beta paper which is what I usually use for daily sketching. As you can see, names don't quite match up actual colors, so I kept referring to this "cheat sheet" on my test. There are wide range of yellows, but lacking in blues.


The pigments themselves are intensely bright and very staining, like a watercolor dye. I used a spare page of my sketchbook to dab the colors to see them, and also used a corner of my metal palette to mix the colors. (Magenta color stained the metal palette, so I had to use a cleanser to get it off. This is powerful stuff!)

This is the resulting sketch of my neighborhood. This was an overcast afternoon day, so the scene wasn't this bright or golden...the colors remained bright, but it was extremely hard to mix a neutral, dark, or earth tones. The colors do not granulate like some watercolors do.



I will stick with my regular paints, but Viviva Colorsheet is small enough to carry around in addition to my usual kit if I want to add an accent color for sketching brightly-colored subject. If you like to use bright marker colors or watercolor dyes (which usually comes in a bottle like Dr. Ph. Marten's, etc.) this is a portable way to carry those colors around.