…and all I can say is that one needs patience if working with these.

I bought the thinner, universal medium, gel, and brush cleaner.

THEY DO NOT DRY!

Sennelier claims that the liquid and gel mediums accelerate drying but in real life the opposite is true. I did tests with straight medium, Pretested arctic blue and real raw umber (Max). The pretested was a poor choice because the paint itself stayed wet at least a week, and the samples with medium stayed wet after the straight paint started to dry. The real raw umber with liquid medium was still extremely wet after 2 days but the gel was starting to tack up. The straight medium was still plenty wet after nearly a week. I’m sure I exceeded the 25% limit when mixing these, but I don’t want to have to worry about something like that causing my paint not to dry at all.

I used the universal medium in a layer of a grisaille with Lukas 1862 several days ago and am regretting it now because it’s still wet despite the driers in 1862 paints.

My experience with the thinner was identical to Ellis et al. The Art Treehouse bio thinner works better in my opinion. It behaves more like turpentine and dries far faster, even in amounts exceeding 25%.

The brush cleaner works but is not as effective as mineral spirits. I’d say it was marginally better than using water with WMOs, and about as effective as cleaning with walnut oil, so no real advantage to buying it. It performs about the same as Treehouse bio thinner for cleaning.

The only advantage is the smell. The products have almost no smell, and it is a faint oily odor, as others have said.

I don’t see myself using these.