Like most beginners in watercolours, I didn’t want to spend a fortune in expensive materials whose good qualities I could not use or appreciate, so I bought a cheap set of 12 colours which included two cheap sable brushes and a pad of cheap watercolour paper.

In this article, I have included two still lives. One was done using Winsor & Newton Artists’ Watercolour paints on Bockinford NOT, 300gsm. The other, with St. Petersburg White Nights watercolours on Gallery watercolour paper, whose cost amounts to almost one third of the first. Click on the thumbnails and see if you can tell the difference!

My very first efforts were not brilliant, although encouraging enough to keep on practicing and painting. Following the advice in books and magazines, I did what almost everyone does: ‘buy the best you can afford‘, and partially blamed my initial failures on my cheap materials

When I changed papers, I could notice an immediate improvement. Heavier papers allowed me to lay washes without cockling. Cool!

But with paints… I suspect I will have to wait quite a few years to see how my student paints fade to indistinguishable insipid tints while artist’s quality ones remain as bright as the moment they were applied to the paper…

The best you can afford
Let me explain.
The problem is that, when you are a beginner, you may have a good idea of what you can afford but no one tells you what the best is. In our cost-effective culture the closest you get, as a beginner, to compare art materials is to borrow a catalog and compare prices. And then, it is too easy to believe that the best has to be the most expensive … hence, inexpensive cannot be good. So, our wise axiom sounds too much like ‘Spend as much money as you can’…

You can also ask for advice from someone you trust. The problem is that you do not know whether they have formed their opinions based on their own experience, or they have heard and accepted the general advice in magazines and books.

So, someone recommended me to use artist’s quality paints and now I am hooked on W&N for all my ’serious’ work. I can’t do without them and would not attempt to do it… although now we have reached the point I wanted to discuss in this post.

Since I gained experiece as an artist, and started to paint and sketch outdoors and abroad, it became obvious to me that a watercolour pad and a set of watercolor pans in a plastic box whose lid becomes a palette was much more practical to carry around.

While painting abroad, the materials you have at home are not always available, so you might be forced to try new papers and paints. It is very probable that you will struggle, because the washes will not behave like at home, and you might feel frustrated as a consequence. But that is great - because even if you do not like the results, I can guarantee that you will gain in experience: You will have become more flexible in the way you handle you paint, brushes and support when you finally return to your good old materials.

Why?
As I remember my exasperation while struggling with some unfamiliar paints and paper, some thoughts come back to my mind: ‘this is not where the paint is supposed to go!‘, ‘this colour should granulate‘, ‘with the amount of water I used I should get a different tint‘, ‘the wash should be absorbed and almost dry by now‘ …

But some time later, I was surprised to realise that my frustration was not because the results were any worse than the standard of work I could produce at the time, but because I was moving outside my comfort zone. As soon as I realised the real reason, I lost my prejudice against affordable materials.

So, that was how I started using St. Petersburg’s ‘White Nights’ pans and a watercolour paper called Gallery. When I am in Argentina, I use a watercolour pad called Williams. And I must say I am sooo happy with them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Beginners, Materials, Watercolors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.