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

Delighted to share a new Optimist Limited Edition, Federal Color has taken their versatile, permanent ink formula and added a healthy dash of spring color, so you can sketch all the buds and blooms of the season.

This special little set includes three 10 mL Precision Bottles in Lilac, Coral, and Buttercup, hand-mixed by color experts for the perfect balance between brightness and lightness. Add Optimist White for even softer pastel tones, or add Optimist Primary Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan to create more intense colors and shift the hues in your desired direction.

Available for a limited time only.

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 the 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. This elemental material is sure to improve your flow.

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

We are proudly an approved Federal Color retailer.