Miya Gouache Paint Set Review | First Impressions

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Hello there! Welcome back! Today I am super excited because I am posting something so out of my normal content, and it feels great! As you may or many not know, I have been playing a lot more in the world of art beyond nails. This varies from art on my iPad, to watercolors, to watercolor pencils, marker, gouache, and now I can add Jelly Gouache to the list.

Jelly Gouache? Yeah I don't know either but I'm obsessed. So I first saw Mac, of The Gladdest Things playing with Jelly Gouache paint, and was intrigued! I feel like I'm still a newbie when it comes to gouache, but I kinda just love art supplies so I also wanted to try it! Ha!! I then did a deep dive on Youtube and was sold. I had to check out Jelly Gouache. 

So all of that considered, last week I treated myself to a Miya / Himi Gouache Paint Set, the mint green one off of Amazon. You can click the image below to go check it out on Amazon, it does come in other colors too!

I opted for the one without brushes, as I already have a lot of brushes and like mine, and doing that made this about $23.99. It took a few days to arrive, and when it did show up it was like 109 ° so I decided I should probably just let it set and cool off. I know with nail polish and such you should always wait about 24hrs before using so I kinda followed that same thought. Don't know if you have too, but I did anyway! :)

So the Miya set actually says Himi on the lid, so I'm not really sure if the brand is Himi or Miya? Anywhoo, once you open the paint set you will find a palette about the same size of the lid sitting on top of the lil jelly cups! Then below that are the jelly paint cups. They all have little foils on them, which you will see in the video on Youtube. As best as I could tell, there were no names/numbers specific to each cup, so I just peeled off the lil foils, and scrapped off excess paint back into the jelly cup and disposed of the lil foils.

After I did that I felt like it would be a good idea to mix up the paints so if there was any separation of any sort I could fix that before using! :) For this I used toothpicks! I got it all on camera too, and honestly the set up of these paints was so fun! Messy? Yeah, but oh so fun! 

You get 18 colors in the set, and 2 of them are white, which I am really happy about because I will more likely than not be using the white a lot to get the colors I traditionally use. 

If you are new to gouache, you may be wondering what Gouache is. I describe it as a cross between acrylic paint and watercolor. Meaning its thick like acrylic paint, and can be opaque like it, or you can add water and make it more watercolor like. Its really great! I love it! As far as I can tell, jelly gouache is about the same! Its always wet though, and not in a tube like Gouache normally is. 

As for swatches, these paints swatched super nice and I'm so excited to sit down and paint something with them in my art journal! Now I am no art professional of any sort, but I do think compared to other gouache paints I have used these were super easy, and it seems as if a little goes a long way which is really nice. Also I think it will be easy to mix colors. I did find that some of my tube gouache paints weren't super easy to mix, some needed water, which then didn't give you the option to use it in its more "acrylic like" form. Therefore it made it more watercolor-y, but since this paint is already wet I think that is why it worked so well.

Color wise they were super accurate and were the colors you would expect! I love the fact that it came with 2 whites because I am not a huge primary color person so I feel like I will mix white into every color I use. I would love to see a pastel set of paints like this! Or just more muted tones maybe? You know more like the colors I tend to gravitate towards in my digital art. I would actually LOVE that because even though I know how to mix colors, I don't love mixing colors!  Ha!

All in all I am super excited about these paints. The overall set up experience was super fun, and based on the swatches and the feeling of how they performed I am really excited to play with them again soon in my actual art journal! If you are interested in checking them out... Here is my set!

Have you used Jelly Gouache paint before?! What did you think? Or do you now want to try it? I hope you enjoyed this blog post, it was really fun and different for me!