Watercolor Painting Materials

 Watercolor Painting Materials List

Paper -- My favorite go to paper is Arches cold press or rough.  A paper for watercolor should have a good sizing, and resist coming apart if it's very wet. 

Paints, I don't have any sort of brand attachment here, but I am a stickler about permanence. My choices for the colors on my palette start with a good colorful way to make a solid dark color and a warm and a cool for each of red yellow and blue.  I am sure it will be better for a new student to use a limited palette, that is still robust enough to produce good results.  

If you need a reference regarding permanence, Taubes or Mayer have defined the standard for Artist's materials. There has been a trend toward making some of these colors cheaper by formulating dyes to simulate the color, which results in different behavior of the color and perhaps a reduction in permanence.  

Any reputable brand of transparent watercolors in these colors: 

Payne's Grey 
Ultramarine Blue 
Burnt Sienna
Alizarin Crimson
Cadmium Red Light
Yellow Ochre
Cadmium Yellow Light
Cerulean Blue

 From a previous post where I talked a bit about my palette: 

 

Paint -- From left to right. You don't really need all these colors.  The pthalo blue and alizarin  are powerful colors so there a bit of effort required to manage these.  In general the organization is to make it easier to mix the colors I mix together the most, and to keep some of the pale colors near the top.  

 

Ultramarine Blue 

Alizarin Crimson 

Burnt Sienna -- In the corner

Cadmium Red Medium

Cadmium Red Pale 

Yellow Ochre 

Cadmium Yellow Medium 

Cadmium Yellow Pale

Cerulean Blue 

Payne's Grey 

Thalo Blue 

Burnt Sienna 

Burnt Umber

This arrangement keeps the yellows and pale blues fairly clean and provides for a variety of greys and blacks.   

 

Brushes
 

Although I have a bucket of brushes, mostly I use two or three.  A 1" flat camel and a #8 sable round made by Dan Smith.  I rarely use any other brushes.  I have a rigger and the small #4 which is nylon.  Sometimes when I want to wet a large area, I will use a 3" house painting brush. 

 

My collection of brushes is pretty extensive and includes several hundred brushes and meets the requirements of about 10 unique disciplines. All of the brushes in this picture are specifically watercolor brushes.  I have a collection of mops and flats that go beyond the simplest of requirements.  You probably need three: a round #4 and a round #10 or #12 and a 3/4" flat. I occasionally use and old toothbrush.  

A Palette

There is every variety of palette out there, my preference is a flat enameled tray.  Plastic palettes are workable, but I find that water tends to bead up on the surface.  The paper pallets sold in pads don't work well at all, so save that money, If you scrub the enameled tray with an abrasive cleanser it breaks this tendency to bead up.   

A container for water and a sponge.  The container could be a gallon plastic bucket.  I like it to be big enough so I can shove my hand and a sponge into it.  Watercolor painters prefer the Elephant ear sponge, but I have a variety, Sea sponges can get funky, so it's useful to get them dry after using them.  A cellulose kitchen sponge with scotch brite might be useful.  

Things that you might never need include glycerin (slows drying), alcohol (speeds drying), salt (causes paint to have light spots), and liquid friskit (a masking  fluid, which will wreck your brushes).  I also have a small tube of white acrylic paint which I might use to restore some white color to the paper. A razor blade might be used to the same result. I sometimes use a hair dryer to move things along.