Hey. I'm Dalton and my wife Cassie and I own Nicholson's Peerless Transparent Watercolors ("Peerless" for short.) We bought the company from Cassie's aunt in 2019 and we are the 5th owners of the company.

The company itself was founded in 1885 (you read that right - over 130 years ago) by a dashing chemist named Chaz Nicholson.

He had stumbled on a new, better, more fun way to colorize black and white photographs and had to share it with the world.

Turns out watercolor artists all around the world liked these new paints almost better than the photographers did!

And just like that Nicholson's Peerless Transparent Watercolors was born.

Although our paints are still used by a few museums and college level traditional photography to tint and restore photographs our paints are much more geared to watercolor artists these days.

We must love keeping old things in working order because I'm typing this from the porch of our house that was built in 1902. We moved into the city (well into the town portion of our small town) so that we could both be closer to where we work.

We have 2 awesome baby girls - although Seneca is well into her terrible two's at the moment - half of the time she's mad at us for something as trivial as peeling her banana wrong and the other half of the time she's melting into a puddle to avoid doing something she doesn't want to do. She's amazing regardless.

We also have 4 dogs that love to follow the girls around and act as a team of organic rumbas - picking up every spare piece of food Seneca drops (they eat pretty good.)

Cassie also runs a fantastic coffee shop that she owns in town - steering it through COVID was certainly a trial but she managed to make the coffee shop even better during this crazy time while keeping our employees and customers as healthy and safe as possible.

She is an amazing person and I'm so glad to have her on my team.

She's also the much better artist! I grew up playing instruments so that has been my dominant artform for as long as I remember but I'm having a blast getting better and better at painting.

The other artists in the Peerless community have been so fun to meet and have been an invaluable resource as far as learning how to paint goes.

I've never been made to feel small or dumb for asking questions and that speaks volumes to the artists that are part of the storied tradition of our little family run business.

Thank you so much for checking out our shop and do not hesitate to reach out with any question you may have! Stay awesome - Dalton