Next steps: Watercolor Paints
- Deanna Sjolander
- Mar 18
- 3 min read
The quality of your supplies will affect your experience and enjoyment of this medium. You don't have break your bank account to get the best of everything and as you experiment and try out different paints, you may find your style naturally gravitates toward a particular brand or type.
Most art supply stores will have an overwhelming number of choices when it comes to watercolor paint.
Quality:
First, decide whether you want to start with student-grade or professional paints. Professional grade paints will cost up to three times as much as student grade paints; however, they are more pigmented and will last much longer. If you are painting casually or not sure if watercolor is going to be a long-term hobby–student-grade is more than satisfactory.
Many companies that make professional grade paints also make student-grade. One of my preferred brands for student-grade is Winsor & Newton. Their paints are high quality and can be found in both art stores (such as Blick) and craft stores (such as Michaels) and can be found as both pans and tube paints. Sennelier, Rembrandt, and Grumbacher are some other brands that offer both student and professional-quality paints.
Pans vs. Tubes vs. liquid
Watercolor is pigment suspended in a binder such as gum Arabic. Watercolor pans are solid, dried paint, whereas tube paints are in paste form. They are the same in terms of quality, and your decision about which to use is largely based on preference. Most artists who use tube paints allow the paste to dry on a palette and rewet to use.
Pan paints: Solid, dried, compressed watercolor often in plastic or metal wells. They come in 2 sizes–half and full–with half pans being the most common.
The pros:
Perfect if you want a small quantity of a color
Usually less expensive
Pan sets have colors designed to go together
More portable
The cons:
Pans are often available only in paint sets in stores (Winsor & Newton being a notable exception), and you may not use every color included
Fewer colors may be available in pans
Not ideal for large-scale work
Mixing areas are limited for pan sets
Can be hard on your brushes
Tube paints: Paste form and stored in a thin squeezable tube. They can come in a variety of tube sizes, but usually, they are in 5ml or 15ml sizes, depending on the brand. The watercolor can be used directly out of the tube, or it can be squeezed into empty pans or onto a palette, where it will dry out for later use. People who prefer building their palette often prefer to buy tube paint.
The pros:
Great for large-scale work
Cheaper long term because you are buying a larger quantity at once
They last a long time
Can add as much or as little as you like to your palette
Can be added to multiple palettes
More potent out of the tube
The cons:
Initial cost is expensive
Because they come in larger quantities, you can be stuck with a lot of paint if you don’t like the color
May require additional supplies (such as a palette or tray for mixing)
Storing tubes can be annoying
Liquid watercolors are typically ink or dye-based liquid, not pigment-based, so they behave a little differently than pans or tube paint. Liquid watercolors are also typically much more vibrant than traditional watercolors. Some good concentrated or liquid watercolor brands are Dr Ph Martin Radiant Concentrated color, Schmincke Aqua Drop, and Optimist Mixable color.
The pros:
Brighter, more vivid colors.
Ready to use out of the bottle
Great for scanning or creating digital prints
The cons:
May not be lightfast, meaning it will fade more quickly than pigment-based watercolors (For example, DR Ph Martin’s Radiant line is NOT lightfast, but the Hydrus line IS lightfast)
Not all Liquid watercolor can be reconstituted with water once dry (Dr Ph Martin's Hydrus line, for example)
Can be challenging to find the right watercolor paper (amount of pulp vs. cotton)
Recommended Supplies:
MeiLiang 36-color pan set - this was my first set--has nice variety of well-pigmented colors and I used it for the first year of painting.
This list includes the paints I use most often in my work/studio.
This is my recommended list for liquid-concentrated colors. As long as you have red, yellow, and blue (Fuchsia, yellow, and cyan) you can do anything. When you are purchasing liquid colors, you should be careful about warm/cool tones and pay attention to red vs pink and blue/green vs blue/purple. Spectrum matters for mixing!
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