Schmincke watercolours are excellent quality,

also Talens, Blockxx, Grumbacher, Holbein.

If your tubes dries out, open it up and

use as if it was a pan.

Which brand of Paint is best?

What brand of watercolour paint do professionals use?  They use the brand that best suits their style and techniques. So if you’re not sure of what you will be painting, what choice do you make?

Watercolour as we know it is a modern modification of an ancient recipe. From   Neolithic man to Ancient Egyptian wall painters to manuscript illuminators in the middle ages the process for painting on a surface was fairly similar. You ground up some pigment and added a binder to make stick to that surface and you painted it pretty much in one go before the paint dried out. To make it stick, you used a gummy substance such as egg yolk or gum Arabic. In the modern watercolour tube is pigment which has been finely ground to which has been added a little bit of Gum Arabic and a moistening agent such as honey or small amount of wetting agent to make it remain moist in the tube; Pans and Half pans simply omit most of the moistening agent. Modern watercolours can be remoistened after they dry out on the palette and reused. In the tube they generally remain pliable, if they don’t, and your tube turns into a hard lump, open it up with a craft knife and use it as you would a pan. If you get home from the store and squeeze out your paint and you get clear amber liquid – the wetting agent and gum have separated from the pigment through storage at the shop and warehouse. You can keep squeezing until it stops appearing, (your paint will dry in the tube eventually though) or you can take it back and ask for a replacement. This occasional problem is worse with some pigments than others.

 If it’s such a simple recipe what makes the difference between the good stuff – termed artists or professional quality – and the less good, student quality? And if you are just starting out, shouldn’t you just get the student quality because after all it is a little cheaper and you mightn’t be any good at this?

Always buy ' Artists's Quality' watercolour.

Professional or artists quality paint by law, must be made from pigment of a specific quality. It must be ground very fine between large rollers and mullers so that that when it is mixed with water and passed over paper in a loaded brush, these fine granules of paint will hang suspended in the wash allowing the white of the paper to reflect through the spaces in the between .This is what gives watercolour its famous ‘luminous’ quality. The less fine the grind the bigger the particles the more granular and dull the wash will appear.

Because pigments themselves have very individual qualities, some will never be as fine as others. Burnt Umber for instance, and Cobalt colours granulate through a wash leaving a ‘speckled’ or ‘granulation’ appearance  precisely because they contain a mixture of fine and coarser and heavier  particles which sink to the bottom  of the wash layer very fast leaving the top layer of the wash to dry more slowly. Very fine pigments such as a Rose Madder will suspend evenly through the wash giving a clean, glowing look.

There are about 6 top watercolour brands commonly available in Australia and although they all can claim the appellation ‘artists’ quality’ they are all subtly different in inherent qualities from one another. You can only appreciate the differences between them by knowing what watercolour paint is supposed to do in the first place. All good quality brands can be mixed with each other once you learn what their differences will do to the mix. However, you cannot mix student quality with artist quality and expect the good to drag the poor one up to its level- the reverse happens.

If you start out your adventure with watercolour with a poor quality set of colours (and I know that so often inexperienced or well meaning art store staff can be the culprits here) you will find it impossible to reproduce the glorious effects that you see others producing with watercolour and you will begin to blame yourself for muddy washes and colour mixes. Give yourself a break at the very start and buy good quality or even a few of the major brands and find the brand that appeals to you.