Holbein is a family owned company founded in the 1940′s, just after the end of WWII, with corporate headquarters in Japan. The paint is manufactured in Japan. Holbein produces a large round up of different paint and drawing products including oil, acrylic, and watercolor paint lines.
Holbein Acrylic Round-Up:
Holbein product several product lines that are of interest to the acrylic painter:
- Holbein Acryla: Acrylic Resin Pigment offered in 78 hues.
- Holbein Acryla Gouche: Opaque Acrylic Resin Color offered in 108 hues.
- Holbein Acrylic Paint: Acrylic Polymer Emulsion Paint for Artists.
- Holbein Acrylic Colors Mat: Opaque Paint with texture derived with course particles.
- Color Gesso: 21 hues of colored gesso for under-painting and surface prep.
- Acrylic Primer for Glass, Metal, and Ceramic formulated to be use with Holbein Acryla.
- Full line of Mediums, Gels, and Vanishes.
Cool looking Gesso bags:
Holbein definitely has the coolest gesso packaging around. Their colored gesso comes in neat bags that sort of look like hospital IV bags to me. And Holbein offers colored gesso in 21 different hues. If you can’t find one you like, then you might be too picky.
Confusing Labeling:
I find the names Holbein uses for their acrylic paint slightly confusing. I prefer to know exactly what pigment is in each tube. That is hard to know with names like Bamboo Green, Alps Red, Luminous Lemon, or Oriental Blue. Looking over the pigment line, I also see some pigments I recognize such as Cadmium Red Light and Cobalt Blue.
In all fairness, quite a few other paint companies also use this type of naming. (Matisse comes to mind) This does not effect the quality of the paint, but it does make it a bit more tricky for the artist to know which pigment they are dealing with.
If you are a brand loyalist, keeping only one brand on your palette at time, this won’t present much of an issue for you. But if you are like many painters, your studio is full of different brands, tubes, jars, etc.
When when you reach for a yellow hue, and you see something called Luminous Lemon, your brain has to stop and think. Generally that disrupts your creative process a bit and can be annoying over time.
If you use Holbein often, I think you would quickly become familiar with your favorite pigments regardless of their labels.
In the USA:
The company that distributes Holbein in the USA is called HK Holbein. HK Holbein is based in Montreal, Canada and Burlington, Vermont.
Where to buy Holbein Online:
You can purchase Holbein products online through several of the biggies. I found it online at DickBlick, CheapJoes, and Jerry’s Artarama.
You have to pick and hunt as none of these online retailers offers the FULL selection of all the Holbein Acrylic Products. DickBlick had the largest variety that I could find.
Since all the online websites I checked carry the Holbein Acryla, I assume the Acryla tubes might be the most popular product line for Holbein Acrylic in the USA.
To find a real life retailer, you can give the HolbeinHK website’s Find a Retailer feature a spin. The downside is that you can’t directly find the retailers online. The website forces you to first fill out a contact form and provide your email — not the most user-friendly approach in my opinion.
The HolbeinHK site has some snazzy colorcharts, but unfortunately they aren’t printable. Which might not be such a bad idea, since most of our inkjet printers really can’t product a pigment color chart very well.
Like Holbein? Love it? Hate it?
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Tell me why Holbein Acrylic is your favorite in the reply section below.
