We are excited to be one of the first exclusive partners with our good friends at Federal Color in St Louis, MO! 

Optimist Sketching Set of 6

Optimist Mixable Color is an intensely-pigmented, quick-drying, waterproof ink—perfect for sketching and mixed media art. This box contains six intense colors, ready to use right from the bottle. Feel free to drip Optimist straight from the Precision Bottle onto the page—or get a bit more specific by applying Optimist colors with your favorite brushes and dip pens.

The Optimist Sketching Set includes six bold colors that aren't found in the standard CMYK+ Mixing Set. Slide open the box to find six 50 mL Precision Bottles filled with Prussian Blue, Red Violet, Mediterranean, Basil, Federal Red, and Tangerine.

About Optimist:

Introducing Optimist Mixable Color, Federal Color's original ink for art and design. Optimist is made with natural shellac, a beautiful organic resin that binds pigment to paper, resists UV radiation, and dries totally waterproof. Unlike many drawing inks, Optimist includes only lightfast pigments, so the colors mix perfectly, and your work can be displayed for many years without fading.

Use & Care Tips

Using Optimist Mixable Color is simple: grab a dip pen or brush and get some ink on it. You can use Optimist straight from the bottle; it's highly fluid and moves smoothly across paper. You can also dilute it with Optimist Colorless Medium, the purest form of our water-based shellac. (Dilution with water is possible, and produces some nice textures and effects, but please note that adding water will change the characteristics of the ink and make it less waterproof.)

Optimist dries quickly (within a few minutes for a normal application), so you can layer more inks or watercolors over it with no blending or bleeding. It's also an ideal choice for adding opaque highlights and shadows to your watercolor pieces.

Shake well before using. Keep brushes wet during use and wash promptly for best results. To clean up, try a bottle of Optimist Ink Solvent.

Optimist Story

Our good friends at St. Louis Art Supply opened their art supply business in 2015, and one of the first things they learned was how to make india ink. Their original formula was hand-mixed and much less consistent than Optimist, but their customers loved it because traditional shellac-based ink is just special, and it's not that easy to find anymore. Most manufacturers have replaced shellac with acrylic polymer, which has its advantages but is simply not as beautiful as shellac resin.

They stopped selling that early ink recipe a couple years later, but ever since, they've been researching and refining—not to mention, they added a powerful three-roll mill to disperse their pigments with total consistency. Finally, they're experiencing the magic of shellac ink again (we think it smells really nice, even if you remember that it's made by bugs). But now, St. Louis Art Supply's brand new color house, Federal Color, also has the technology and experience to make it a consistent option for serious artists. We are sure this elemental material will improve your flow.

More Info

Each color in this set is packaged in a 50 mL Precision Bottle, which is squeezable and can dispense a drop or a full stream.

Conforms to ASTM D-4236. Made in the United States.