White Nights Watercolors - custom 36 full pans palette

I've already reviewed the White Nights watercolor tubes set. Most of what I said about the tubes applies to the pans, so if you want more of a review, check that out here. The little differences I find between tube/pan is described below.

Today I will be mostly showing my custom palette with 36 full pans. I hope it can be useful as a reference, if you're building your own custom palette. I know I needed them when I was building mine.

Instead of listing the colors, I thought it would be more practical to just show you the color chart with the pigment names, lightfastness rating (as given by the brand: *** for excellent lightfast, ** for moderate, and * for weaker) and opaqueness/transparency rating (empty box for transparent, half empty for semi-transparent and full box for opaque).

I tried, as much as I could, to stick with the single pigment and most transparent colors. As you can see form the chart, many of the colors are semi-transparent and a few are opaque, as informed by the brand. That doesn't bother me too much, but it might bother you if you do a lot of pen and ink. The only really opaque color that I'm careful to use is Cadmium Lemon, because I think it tends to muddy my mixtures. What I do is I try to use it in my favor, like using it alone for adding details on florals, for example.
As I said in the tubes review, sometimes it's even difficult to determine if the color is opaque or simply too intense. The color payoff is incredible! They're easy to rewet and pick up and a little goes a long way. Some earth colors seem to be weaker or more difficult to pick up, like Yellow Ochre, Raw Sienna and Umber. I've seen a few reviews saying Ceruleum Blue was weak, but I don't think mine is weak at all. Ceruleum is a new addition to my palette and I wonder if it has been reformulated, since White Nights released new colors in 2017. So my Ceruleum Blue came in the same order as the new Ultramarine Violet, Indian Yellow and the 4 Sonnet line metallics.

As for the lightfastness rating, I haven't done any tests until today (maybe I will one of these days, and then I can update this post or make a new one), but there is controversy as for how lightfast these paints are. I talk more in detail about it in this post.

I prefer the pans over the tubes, not only for the wider options of color but also for their creamy texture. The tube paints, when squeezed on a palette, tend to dry harder than the whole pans. I'm not sure why, maybe the tubes don't have so much honey in their composition?

I really love these paints! They gave me the opportunity to work with a wide range of pigments without spending too much. I don't have many professional artist grade paints, I only have a few M Graham tubes, which are awesome, but I can buy close to 6 whole pans of White Nights for the price of a single 15ml tube of M Graham's.

I have a pan of Black that I don't keep in the palette, but I use it for sketches and studies like the one below:

Here's some swatches of the metallic paints on a black paper:

 Here's a closeup trying to catch their shiny gorgeousness:

And a sketch using the beautiful Copper:

My pictures don't do them justice, tough.

(click to enlarge)
I love the granulation of their earthy pigments!

I really, really recommend White Nights as a whole! I hope my little blog post may have been helpful if you're interested in trying White Nights or expanding your existing palette.

Happy painting!
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I bought my all my White Nights from these eBay sellers:
hobbyanddecor and sahstore