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

Optimist CMYK+ Set of 6

CMYK+ is Federal Color's complete mixing system, with a color range and intensity that go way beyond standard mixing sets from other brands. Unlike classic red-yellow-blue color mixing, CMYK allows for brighter secondary colors (especially purple and green) and an overall wider range of hues. Our Primary Cyan, Primary Magenta, Primary Yellow, and Black are designed to work perfectly together, with matching pigment loads and handling characteristics that enable clearer, cleaner mixed colors.

What's the "plus" in CMYK+? That would be the White and Colorless Shellac Medium, both included in this box. The white is incredibly opaque, thanks to its extremely high pigmentation, and allows you to make lovely pastel shades from each mixed color you create. The colorless medium allows perfect dilutions of each mixed color, increasing transparency and gloss while increasing the chroma of darker colors.

The CMYK+ Set of 6 includes Federal's 50 mL Precision Bottles in Primary Cyan, Primary Magenta, Primary Yellow, White, Black, and Colorless Shellac Medium, all in a slide-out box with foil stamping. It's a great gift for any artist and an excellent starting point for anyone interested in working with inks.

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.

We are proudly an approved Federal Color retailer.