Kuretake Gansai Tambi Watercolor No.504 GREEN GRAY

Green Gray No. 504 is a muted gray-green from the Gansai-Tambi line by Kuretake – handcrafted in Japan, pressed into a generously sized pan. The tone lies between cool slate green and olive gray: saturated enough for large areas, restrained enough for shadows and atmospheric glazes. The color blend of Phthalo Green (PG7), Iron Oxide Red (PR101), Iron Oxide Black (PBk11), and Yellow Ochre pigment (PY42) creates a tone with inner depth that shifts between mossy-opaque and delicate-transparent depending on water dilution.

Special Features

• Traditional Japanese watercolor – Gansai-Tambi colors are more opaque than Western transparent watercolors. Green Gray can be used pure and opaque-pasty, or thinned with water to create a transparent wash.
• Large pan (48 × 28 mm) – the oversized format allows for broad brushes and generous brushwork; ideal for large backgrounds, quick sketches, and expansive color areas.
• Creamy-soft consistency – the color activates quickly with a damp brush and lies smoothly on the surface; after drying, it develops a subtle silk sheen.
• Pigment combination without white pigment (PW6) – unlike many Gansai-Tambi tones, No. 504 contains no titanium white, which promotes clear, unmuddied results when mixing with other colors.
• Hand-filled in Japan – minor irregularities or air bubbles on the surface are inherent to the manufacturing process and do not affect the paint's application properties.
• Available as single pan – the pan can be inserted into existing Gansai-Tambi sets or combined into a custom palette.

Application & Tips

• Illustration & Botany – Green Gray works as a shadow color for leaves, stems, and background vegetation; when thinned with more water, the tone acts like atmospheric haze over a landscape.
• Architecture & Urban Sketching – the muted gray-green tone precisely captures the color of weathered stone, old ivy, and moss joints – without appearing intrusive.
• Hand Lettering & Calligraphy – on smooth, ink-resistant paper, the color can be taken directly from the pan with a filled water brush and used as a colored fill for brush lettering.
• Layering – because the color sits on the paper rather than soaking in, work quickly when overpainting wet layers; dry layers can be easily overpainted with additional tones.
• Mixing – Green Gray mixes well with other Gansai-Tambi tones; combined with dark blue tones, it creates a cool slate green; with earth tones, a warm olive gray.
• Paper recommendation – glazing effects are best shown on watercolor paper from 200 g/m²; on smooth, calendered paper, the opacity remains maximally preserved.

For Illustration & Watercolor Enthusiasts

No. 504 Green Gray is pigmentologically interesting because it dispenses with white pigment (PW6) – the four pigments PG7, PR101, PBk11, and PY42 create the broken gray-green tone through subtractive mixing. This means: when mixing with other colors, no milkiness occurs that can develop with white-pigment-containing tones. Gansai Tambi is considered traditional Japanese watercolor and behaves differently than Western transparent watercolors – the color sits on the paper rather than soaking into the fibers, which allows precise edge control but requires quick work when wet-on-wet painting.

Technical Data