From the manufacturer: CMYK+ is our 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 our 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 our 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. Introducing Optimist Mixable Color, our 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 and 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.

From the manufacturer: Optimist Mixable Color is waterproof, so it can be tricky to remove from surfaces and brushes if it dries. That's why we created Optimist Ink Solvent, a gentle solvent that breaks the chemical bonds in wet or dry shellac. Squeeze Optimist Ink Solvent onto your palette and brushes after a painting session, and our shellac-based ink will quickly start to break up and peel away. Rinse brushes after using Ink Solvent for best results. Optimist Ink Solvent is packaged in a 200 mL Precision Bottle. Squeeze the bottle to dispense a controlled flow.

From the manufacturer: The heart of Optimist Mixable Color is shellac medium. This magical amber liquid is the perfect binder for all kinds of pigments because it's strong, flexible, UV-resistant, and waterproof. Unlike acrylic mediums, our Colorless Shellac makes gorgeous transparent glazes when used in high proportions with color. Add Colorless Shellac Medium to Optimist inks to make them lighter, more transparent and glossier. Using shellac-thinned Optimist colors, you can make complex, multi-layered paintings. Paper and pigment textures are more noticeable, and the ink moves more freely. With high proportions of medium, you'll create thin, shiny layers that look almost like stained glass. With smaller proportions, you can achieve bright, high-chroma colors. Shellac is made by insects, much like beeswax or silk. It is a reddish, resinous substance that is deposited on tree branches by kerria lacca, informally known as a lac bug. These tiny insects are native to South Asia, which is why shellac-based inks are often called "India ink," even when they are made nowhere near India. Shellac is a natural thermoplastic, predating all synthetic plastics and offering a much better environmental profile—since there are no fossil fuels involved in shellac's synthesis. The cultivation process is much lower-carbon than other forms of agriculture, because lac farmers use existing trees to host their colonies. Lac is an economic reason to protect the forests, rather than cut them down to cultivate other crops. Once the farmers scrape the raw "sticklac" from the tree bark, they heat it over a fire to liquefy it, allowing them to filter out the bark and other impurities. Some shellac (like the premium material that we use) also undergoes dewaxing, in which the 10% wax content of raw shellac is removed. This leaves a nearly pure resin that can be turned into a food additive, a protective coating, an adhesive... or, a bottle of ink.