M. Graham Intermediate 10-Color Watercolor Paint Set, 1/2-Ounce Tube

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The choice of brand seems to be quite a personal choice. I prefer Daniel Smith. They produce beautiful vibrant colors, lay down smoothly and re-wet easily in my palette. You can read more about what I consider good watercolor brands here… Earth Tone Mixing– While the only earth tone in this set is Transparent Red Iron Oxide, the set has almost unlimited potential for easily mixing a number of beautiful, transparent and luminescent earth tones such as ochres, umbers, siennas, oxides, olives and other rich earthy hues. Many artists love WN’s light value because the paints work so well in glazes, yet this characteristic can cause them to go washy in mixes, and their transparency often doesn't play well when mixed with highly granulating pigments. Cool Blue – Phthalo Blue GS: PB15:3 (Transparent & single pigment). The “GS” means “Green Shade”. The green shade option is what makes this a cool blue. This is an excellent blue paint with a fine texture and good saturation. So in the following lines I’ll give you the simple truth about what you need to look for when selecting watercolor paints.

This wild sky desertscape shows the vibrancy of these watercolors. I used everything in my palette, with the exception of Burnt Umber. I’m not shy when it comes to using color and love to paint intense skies. It seems like I barely touched the Anthraquinone Blue in for the clouds and they came out extremely vibrant. This paper is a handmade cotton rag paper by Saint-Armand Papetiers. Quinacridone Burnt Orange: PO48 (Transparent & single pigment). This is a beautiful orange earth color. It has a similar color appearance to burnt sienna, and makes some wonderful colors when mixed with blue. Honey was used in the 19th century by French colourmen and was then copied by English manufacturers. Manufacturers soon substitued the honey with industrial sugars, probably for economic reasons. When you select your paints, the characteristics you need to take into consideration are the following:

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See Charlie’s My Little Palette post for his travel palette set-up and the list of M. Graham paints that he uses. Winsor & Newtonwatercolors (or watercoloursfor the diehard WN fan)have been in production since 1835 and currently offer 96 colors. Through the years, WN has consistently produced an excellent product which has resulted in the brand often being described by artists as "The Standard." When asked by M. Graham how I use their paints, I realized that I have never really given much thought to how I use them. I just put them to work upon many hundreds of my watercolor paintings. My mind hardly pays attention to how I use them as much as I pay attention to what they are doing in the act of painting. The best answer is the honest one: I keep M. Graham paints in my watercolor palette and use them every time I paint, which is almost daily.

Ok… Now imagine you’re looking at a manufacturer’s paint chart. What exactly should you be looking for ?Student grade paints are cheaper than professional watercolors. This is because the ingredients aren’t the same (something has to make them cheaper… Right?). Transparency – 100% of the colors in this set are rated as transparent. An excellent choice for luminosity and clean bright glazes. I have to admit…when I first started watercolors I agonized over my choice of paints. It can be pretty confusing trying to compare different brands, colors, and all the various characteristics of this beautiful art medium. A tip I learned from the Guest Doodlewasher Jane Blundell on filling pans that is genius – only fill them part way, and at an angle. This creates a slanted surface for your brush to slide in, and a little reservoir at the bottom for more diluted paint. This works much better than stabbing the brush into a full pan. I angled these when I squirt the paint into the pan, and did a little tapping of the pan on my desk. On a couple, I used a palette knife to get the angle.

The color index name is established and published by the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists and The Society of Dyers and Colourists. The color index name is a generic category and does not refer to a specific pigment. While it enables the artist to form a general idea of opacity, transparency and lightfastness, for a pigment in a certain color space, it does not provide definitive information. Many grades of pigment are available from a number of manufactures with a very wide range of physical attributes. Whether I glaze or just make spontaneous spots of color, these paints perform better than ALL other manufacturer’s paints, and I have used them all! Wet into wet, dry brush, glazing, mixing on the paper, or any other method I use to deliver the paint to a painting, the results always serve to excite my painting clients (and me!). Like WN, DS does offer 5 ml sizes for sampling, but smaller sizes are nearly impossible to find over the counter. DS offers various dot cards for testing, but again, they are nearly impossible to find in stores. Most art stores do carry DS full-sized tubes, so if you don’t mind shelling out a moderate sum for a color you know you’ll use, these watercolors are worth every penny. Why I Use M. Graham Watercolors By Mike Bailey AWS and NWS member Mike Bailey @me_bailey_art shares why M. Graham paints permanently reside in his palette in the latest M. Graham blog. Tubes give you the best of both worlds and in my opinion work out cheaper in the long run. You can either work with fresh paint squeezed from the tubes, or if you want the convenience of a palette of colored pans, you can simply fill up some empty pans with paint from the tube! And on top of that, one 15ml paint tube will fill up your pans more than once!

Acrylic

Armed with a few good insights I hope you’ll feel confident about choosing the watercolors which best fit your needs. How to Choose the Best Watercolor Paints Green – Phthalo Green BS: PG7 (Transparent & single pigment). The “BS” stands for “Blue shade” . You’ll find that the pigment PG7 is used in a large number of convenience green mixes by various manufacturers. When mixed with yellows and earth colors this pigment makes an amazing range of greens. Convenience Colors: Daniel Smith began in 1976 with the manufacture of printing inks, but they have become one of the most popular watercolor brands in the U.S. Daniel Smith's popularity has partly arisen from their massive selection of colors,but also their watercolors are often made with pigments that no other company offers. Lightfastness is a rating of how much a particular paint will fade or discolor over time when exposed to light. Watercolor paints are rated using the ASTM scale (American Standard Test Measure) which ranges from “excellent” to “very poor”. Granularity Warm Yellow – Hansa Yellow Deep: PY65 (Semi-transparent / single pigment). This pigment gives a beautifully warm, vibrant, and pure yellow appearance. It only undergoes a very slight color shift as it dries, keeping most of its color saturation. Makes fantastic oranges when mixed with warm reds.

Convenience colors are ready mixed colors that you use so frequently it makes life so much easier to have them available in your palette. I use a couple of them – Sap Green and Payne’s Gray (see darks below). Below is a breakdown of all the colors currently in my studio palette. These are mostly single pigment and transparent paints which I selected after long deliberation. I suggest you begin with a set of six primary colors (a warm and cool version of yellow, blue, and red). In theory, you can mix any color using just the primary colors, but in reality you need at least one warm and cool version of each primary color to get a full range of mixable colors. The basic box set comes with 3 Primary colors, a green and a brown. The color range is quite limited, but I would show how this limited palette is able to offer a good range of colors when mixed. The tubes in this box set are ½ ounce tubes; the Hues are namely, Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue, Azo Yellow or Aureolin, Sap Green and Burnt Sienna.

Watercolor

Cobalt Teal Blue: PG50 (Semi-transparent & single pigment). This is another beautiful blue-green hue. The paint retains its saturation well after drying. You’ll find the same pigment used in paints with various names, but “Teal” is the pure version of this turquoise color. This paint is quite granular.