Best Watercolors to use for beginners and intermediate level artists

A common mistake I see many of the beginners who start with Watercolors do is not using artist grade watercolors. Many people keep asking me in my workshops or Instagram Live sessions if they can start with any non professional or non artist grade colors. Here is why you should NOT DO THAT AT ALL. The problem is, if you use some other student grade watercolor to begin with, then you will NOT get good results no matter how good you paint. 

Instead you can go for a low cost, affordable set of Watercolors to start with as a beginner, but make sure that you are using ARTIST GRADE Watercolors only. They can be either tubes or pans, that doesn't make much of a difference but it MUST BE ARTIST GRADE. 

How to check if the colors are artist grade Watercolors?

Don't worry much about it. You just need to check if it is mentioned on the pack of those colors that they are artist grade watercolors. That's it. Sounds easy right ? Yes it is !

So, now that you know what you should mainly first check before buying your watercolors, I will quickly let you know few more things that you can check before you buy your colors. Also keep reading till the end to know what type of Watercolors I use since it is a simple but amazing trick to get your own customised good colors at an extremely affordable price. 

Look out for ​the transparency rating, the lightfastness rating and the granularity of the paints. Reading these terms for the first time ? 

Don't worry I will explain them one by one. To find this information about your paints, you can simply read the paint labels, or do some research on the manufacturer's website to know more if you are buying online. 

TRANSPERANCY

Some watercolors are more transparent than others. You can obviously can the transparency by adding more water to you pigment, but the original nature of the watercolors can sometimes differ from brand to brand. You can check the label to know the transparency rating of any particular watercolor.

All the watercolor paints are mostly categorized into 3 categories

• transparent
• semi-transparent
• opaque

There is nothing wrong in using any of these three types. You just need to find out your style and choose a brand that provides you the transparency rating that you desire. I personally prefer my watercolors to be transparent since that is the whole purpose of me using watercolors. For a opaque paint medium, I rather prefer going for acrylics or gouache.

LIGHTFASTNESS

Lightfastness is a rating of how much a particular watercolor will fade out over a period of time when exposed to light. Watercolor paints are rated with a lightfastness rating ranging from 'Excellent' to 'very poor' You can check that on the label and buy the one with excellent or good lightfastness.

ARTIST GRADE WATERCOLORS

I would again like to emphasise on this. Use ONLY Artist Grade Watercolors. Student grade paints are much cheaper than professional or artist grade watercolors. This is because the ingredients used to make both of these are not the same. So to reduce the total price, paint manufacturers use less pigment or cheaper version of the pigments which result in lower manufacturing costs but naturally degrade the quality of watercolors to a large extent. Student grade paints are a BIG NO since they don't blend easily, are not that vibrant and are more difficult to work with. Yes you read it right ! 

So, even if you are a beginner, you can buy very affordable artist grade colors from good brands. I will pin down all my personal preferences of watercolors below with there amazon links as well. You can then check them out from there by simply tapping on it.

Ok. Now, apart from these basic categories which I told you, in general you’ll find that watercolor comes in two different formats: tubes or pans.

WATERCOLOR PAINTS FORM TYPES - TUBES OR PANS ?

Ok Great ! Now that you know what to look for before buying your colors, let's see the different form in which watercolors are available. You can get them mainly in form of Tubes or Pans

Tubes are filled with liquid paint directly. Watercolor Pans, also know as cakes by some brands are little containers with dried cakes of paint in them. The pans are available in two sizes known as full pan or half pan. Now apart from this, there is another technique which I personally prefer a lot. It is making my own customised watercolor pan palette by converting the tube colors into pans. This is something I love doing and is also really affordable if you love using cake colors but find them costly. Keep reading ahead to know more about it.

1. WATERCOLOR CAKES OR PANS

I personally prefer usually pans or cake colors a lot due to various reasons. They are very easy to use. You can carry them anywhere with ease as they are very compact in size too. The pigments are also rich in color.

Quick Tip: Before using cakes or pans, just drop in a few drops of water on your colors. This will help in activating the colors and you will get a nice rich pigmented hue while painting.

Good quality Brands perfect for Beginners at affordable price: Camlin Cake colors (24 Shades) 

Best quality Brands with a high range: Winsor & Newton (12 Shades) , Sennelier Aquarelle (8 Shades)

2. WATERCOLOR TUBES

Tubes are much cheaper compared to pans in the long run. You can either work with fresh paint squeezed from the tubes, or you can simply fill up some empty pans with paint from the tube. Talking about this in detail below. 

Tubes also have rich pigmented shades. They work great but you will need to remove your color continuously while painting and will need a separate palette for that. If you don't close the lids of your tubes properly, there are chances that your color will dry up completely. 

Quick Tip: Make sure you close the lids of the tubes properly after use so they don't dry up quickly.

Good quality Brands perfect for Beginners at affordable price: Brustro Tubes (24 Shades) 

Best quality Brands with a high range: Daniel Smith (6 Shades) , Winsor & Newton (6 Shades)

3. CONVERTING TUBES TO PANS

This is the best part and something that I personally love using. You can actually buy tube colors and buy some empty pan sets which are available. Then you can remove your tube colors in those pans and let it set for a day. After this you can use the pans normally for watercolor.

Why to do this ? 

This is extremely affordable and gives ease to use with a compact size. Let me explain in detail. So, the watercolor tubes are usually ranging from around 5 ml tubes to 12 ml or 15 ml tubes. Moreover, you always get the tubes quite cheaper as compared to the pan sets. There are 2 types of pans. The half pans are around 1.5 ml is size while the full pans are around 3 ml. 

So, if you calculate, when you convert tubes into pans, you can fill up your pans completely with new color atleast 5 times or more with one single tube color. YES! You read that right. It's it just awesome ?! So, this is my affordable watercolor paint trick I am sharing with you all after doing a lot of research for a really long time. Oh, you are welcome :)

You can find some great empty watercolor palettes which you simply fill up with your choice of paint colors of any single brand or multiple brands you like. You can just buy one with a lid like to keep your paint dust free when not in use. I have given the amazon links for different set of empty pans below for your reference. 

Best Empty Pan Sets of various Sizes : 24 Half Pan set with metal box , 48 Half Pan set with metal box , 12 Half Pan set with metal box

Good quality Brands perfect for Beginners at affordable price: Brustro Tubes (24 Shades) 

Best quality Brands with a high range: Daniel Smith (6 Shades) , Winsor & Newton (6 Shades)

Apart from this, I also have a video on 'How to convert your Watercolor Tubes to Pans' on my YouTube Channel 'Arty Vibes by Sanika' I hope that will help you :)

WHICH BRANDS TO USE

You can use any brand as far as you check out all the above things I have mentioned before buying your colors. You can go with any number of shades as you can afford. You must atleast have a set of six primary colors (a warm and cool version of yellow, blue, and red) to begin with. In theory, they say that you can mix and get 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. If you don't understand what I am saying, just give me some time, I will come up with a detailed color theory blog soon. 

So if you have these 6 primary shades I mentioned, then you can make any other shades you want. So, I will just write down and provide you with amazon links of the paints I prefer for a beginner and an intermediate level. You can browse through and buy whichever suits you the best. These are just my personal preferences, so feel free to go for any other brands you want.

I have already mentioned all the brands that you can start with in the above writeup. So, tap on those brand names to go to those particular products amazon links.

Hope you got a better idea about watercolor paints from this blog. If you did, just let me know in the comments. You can tap on the blog title to check out my other similar blog on 'Types of Papers that you can use for painting' Thank you for reading. 

Have a great day !

Take care :)

- Sanika