Schmincke Akademie Gouache is a sketching and color study medium for artists, art students, and hobbyists. Despite its affordable price, Akademie is a great gouache, with high opacity, good pigment load, and smooth matte finish. Professionals and serious artists doing finished work in gouache should use Schmincke Horadam Gouache instead, but for sketches, practice, and college classes, we think Akademie is a fantastic choice.

This starter set comes with five 20 mL tubes of Akademie Gouache in primary cyan, primary magenta, primary yellow, black, and white. With these five colors, you can mix any color with the powerful CMYK mixing system. It's especially important for designers and illustrators to learn the CMYK system, since it is used almost universally in today's commercial art. In comparison with red-yellow-blue mixing, CMYK produces higher-chroma (more intense) colors and can reach more points on the color wheel.

Just like Schmincke's professional-grade products, Akademie Gouache is 100% made in Germany. Every color is opaque, with a matte finish and excellent lightfastness. It's rewettable when dry, so you can reactivate dry gouache in your palette or modify dry layers of paintings.