Paint!

Now the fun part — the paint!

Watercolor is a versatile medium. Spritz with water, and you’re good to go. Some artists who paint in other media use watercolors for quick studies and painting on the go.

I’ve tried many brands over the years and am settling into my favorites brands and colors. Colors are very personal and dependent on where you live and what you want to paint.

There are two types of paints: paints in tubes, and paints in pans. Most artists buy tube paints and squeeze them into their palette. The paints will dry in a couple of days and are ready to go.

Kuretake

I love these pan colors for beginners.

For those who want to try the hobby, you can’t beat this price point for the color options and lusciousness of the paints. They come in pans, not tubes. I’ve read that they are not lightfast, meaning professionals would not use them for paintings because the colors will fade in light. For us mere mortals and for use in our sketchbooks, they are perfect. See more information here. You will need a palette to make puddles of color because one is not included with this set.

I made a color chart because the colors do not look the same in the pan as they do when they are activated with water.

Best tube set

Tubes are higher quality than pans, and you can choose your own colors. I purchased many different colors when I was starting out, and wish that I had limited my purchases to eight tubes: a warm and cool of each of the primaries, a brown, and a dark. This set from Daniel Smith has a warm and cool in each of the primary colors for a good price point. If you add a brown and a dark (to achieve darker values), you will have everything you need to paint many paintings. Greens are easy to mix with yellow and blue, and sometimes a touch of red to neutralize.
With tubes, you will need some sort of palette. You can use plates from your kitchen for now. I have a portable palette, a plastic palette, and a porcelain palette. Now that I have settled on my colors (after years of exploring), I usually use the colors in my portable palette. Once in a while I will pull out the other palettes if I am painting with different colors.

If you decide to get a portable palette, it’s easy! I recommend full pans, as it is easier to get paint onto your brush. Just squeeze out paint from your tubes into the pans, leave them for a day or two to dry, and presto! Spritz and you are ready to go.

M. Graham

All paints have pigment, or color, and binder. M. Graham uses honey as the binder. Watercolors are activated by adding water, but it is harder to get a sufficient amount of pigment out after paints have dried into little knobs. This is particular true with earth tone colors. When we add water, we dilute the value of the pigment.

The M. Graham colors do not dry out. This means that I can come to my palette the next day and the colors remain the consistency of, well, honey — and I can get more pigment, or color, on my brush. I am now replacing my basic tube paint colors with this brand. My cool blue, Prussian Blue, and brown, Raw Umber, are M. Graham brand. I use Phthalo Blue Red shade, the color of the Pacific Northwest, which is Daniel Smith and also very juicy. As I use up my Daniel Smith colors that dry pretty hard, I will replace them with M. Graham brand.

Whether colors stay moist depends on the humidity of where you live and the season. When painting in Hawaii, any brand of paint seems to stay moist. In Colorado, they all dry out — I spritz every few minutes. In Washington State, where I live, paints stay fairly moist in the winter and dry out quicker in the summer, especially if I am painting outside.

Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith is a favorite brand of many artists. They have amazing colors!

Daniel Smith dry out more than M. Graham (the binder is pure gum arabic), but M. Graham has a limited range of colors. Some of my go to colors are Daniel Smith brand. I enjoy Cascade Green, a forest-y shade of green that splits into green and turquoise when activated with water. The background of the samovar painting below was done with Cascade Green, so I get two colors and values with one color. I also use their Phthalo Greens, both the red and green shade (the green shade is the color of the tropics, to my eye), Carbazole Violet, and several teal colors.

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