Watercolour Painting - Getting it Together

So you want to paint, now lets get equipped to produce your first masterpiece. Before you put your Nikes on and dash of to buy out your local art shop you need to have a list of what you need, saves a lot of time and a hell of a lot more money.

Paints

Watercolours come in tubes and pans. Pans are hard little tablets of paint which need to be softened with water, and lightweight and easy to transport about. Tubes are ready to use so less hassle so good to begin with.

There are many different paint manufacturers of both student and artist quality paints. To begin with student quality is cheaper so finding your painting preferences is less of a hard push on your wallet. The easy way to tell the difference is the stars on the tubes. Like hotels the more stars the more you can expect from your paint. So which of the manufacturers is best? Again it is personal preference and well worth varying the brand till you find the one that suits your painting. I work in Dahler Rowney and sometimes even now trial other paints but DR suits me so I come back to it.

So now colours, oh wow there is so many. Keep your palette simple is a golden rule. Choose 8 or 9 paints and work with them. My 9 palette consists of:

• Ultramarine Blue
• Burnt Umber
• Alizarin Crimson
• Cobalt Blue Hue
• Lemon Yellow
• Light Red
• Raw Sienna
• Payne's Grey
• Hooker's Green Dark

Also I carry two tubes of gouache, namely permanent white and flesh tone. Gouache is useful to have in the kit box and I'll explain that in due course.

Two major NOT DOs at this point.

• Don't buy a huge great box of every colour available, you'll never use them.
• Don't buy bargain bucket paint, they don't mix properly even separate on the paper which is frustrating to say the least.

Brushes

Again be minimal, you don't need a roll of a hundred brushes, 3 will do fine and cover everything. So the brush list:

• Large one and half inch hake/flat brush. This is the watercolourists workhorse. Goat hair is preferable but synthetic will do.
• Small three-quarter inch hake/flat brush. Idea for smaller areas. Goat hair is again preferable but synthetic is fine.
• No 3 rigger. This the detail work brush. Fine lines, curves even a signature.

Paper

Always use watercolour paper. So they types of paper available are:

• Hot Pressed Paper - Very smooth surface, ideal for illustrative work.
• Cold Pressed (Not) Paper - a medium grained surface and is the most used and easiest to find.
• Rough Paper - A very rough surface paper.

Paper can be bought as sheets or pads. The pads come in various sizes from postcard size to 20x24 inches. About A3 is the easiest and most convenient size and for starting out a cold pressed paper, minimum 300gsm. Anything less than 300gsm weight will need pre-soaking and stretching and unless you got nothing better to do with your time that's a royal pain in the butt.

Other Kit

• White plate, tray or palette.
• Large jar, pot for water
• Cloths or old rags to wipe brushes
• Pencil, HB is fine
• Ruler
• Putty eraser
• flat board larger than your paper all round.
• Masking Tape
• Masking fluid
• Hair dryer (OK not essential but useful for speeding up drying)