Art Supplies Spotlight: RuCo Paints Venus Collection, Wylder Collection & Other Single Paints (Handmade Watercolour)

Wendyy Nguyen
22 hours ago
3 min read

Hi friends,

I’m back with another Art Supplies Spotlight, and today I’m diving into part of my RuCo Paints Handmade Watercolor collection. I’m featuring two boxes today — my Venus Collection and my Wylder Collection. Each box holds about 15 colours, with 10 colours belonging to the original collection and five additional colours that I purchased separately as singles.

RuCo Paints has evolved and grown so much over the past year, and their offerings have changed along the way. I purchased these two collections back in 2023 when wooden boxes were still being offered. Since then, the wooden boxes have been discontinued and collections are now packaged in black metal tins, containing 12 colours instead of the original 10.

I’ve watched this brand grow and flourish for several years now, and Marlena — the woman behind the business — is such an inspiration to me. She is a mother of two running her business largely as a one-woman show. Over the years the brand has really refined its identity and values, focusing on the message that “everyone is creative.” Their paints, palettes and tools are designed to help people unlock and explore their own creativity.

Now, onto the colours.

The Venus Collection

"Venus is a celebration of natural beauty, prosperity, femininity, fertility, love and desire."

The Venus Collection features white ceramic pans glazed with a beautiful pearlescent lustre and contains 10 colours: Bronze, Shadow, Jupiter, Aquamarine, Nymph, Neptune, Purple Ochre, Florence, Silk and Leo.

Additional pans I purchased separately include: Lemon, Meadow, Diablo, Lyria and Dragon.

The colours in this wooden box are a mixture of single pigments and blended colours. Lemon, Lyria and Purple Ochre are single pigment paints, while the majority of the set consists of blends. Lyria is staining, flat and transparent which is typical of a phthalo pigment. There are also a few more opaque colours such as Nymph, Jupiter and Leo, along with three single-pigment shimmer paints — Aquamarine, Silk and Bronze.

A few colours lean toward the moodier side, particularly Shadow, Diablo and Meadow, but overall, most of the palette feels quite bright and vibrant such as Dragon which is a bright cool leaning green with a subtle red shimmer. The set also includes a useful trio of colours that work well as primaries for mixing: Lemon, Lyria and Florence.

Overall, this box offers good mixing potential and versatility. Most colours have strong tinting strength, with the exception of Purple Ochre, which is a softer, lower-tinting earth tone.

RuCo Paints Handmade Watercolor Paint Swatch Watercolor Properties Transparency Opacity Staining Granulation Granulating Lightfastness Pigment — **RuCo Paints Venus Collection Wooden Box**

See below for swatches of all the colours in the Venus Collection.

See below for swatches of the additional single pans in the Venus Collection box.

The Wylder Collection

The Wylder Collection is probably one of my favourite collections from the RuCo range. I love the mixture of colours and I feel the overall collection is balanced quite well.

"Inspired by our innate wildness — both within us and surrounding us in the natural world. This collection is moody, granulating and textural, made only with the finest artist pigments, ethically sourced micas, our natural binder and a whole lot of magic."

The Wylder Collection features brown ceramic pans and contains 10 colours: Kingfisher, Myth, Buttercup, Tiger, Clementine, Lust, Dune, Druid, Mustang and Ghost.

Additional pans I purchased separately include: Seaglass, Superslide (now renamed Raine), Hibiscus, Mangrove, Northwall and Marmalade.

The colours in this wooden box are a mix of textural, granulating pigments with varying levels of transparency and opacity.

Colours like Kingfisher, Superslide and Seaglass are particularly textural and highly granulating, with large particles clearly visible in washes. Kingfisher is a blend of pigments, with one being Lapis Lazuli, while the others appear to be single-pigment colours. From the colour and texture, Superslide is possibly Egyptian Blue (PB51), and Seaglass may be Victoria Green (PG51).

Mangrove and Northwall are both earth pigments. Mangrove has a lower tinting strength and is quite transparent, while Northwall behaves more like a Hematite — stronger in tinting strength and more opaque.

There are also three shimmer pigments in the box: Mustang, Marmalade and Ghost. Ghost is an interference mica pigment with a strong green reflect.