Choosing your colours & expanding your pallet
When it comes to watercolours, the colour palette is your artistic playground. Painting is an exciting journey, and one of the crucial elements is selecting the perfect colours and mediums to help you create the world as you see and imagine it. In this article, I want to dive into picking your paints and explore the diverse world of watercolours, including tube paints, solid pans, watercolour pencils, and crayons. Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting, this guide will help you navigate through the vast world of paints, sharing tips on what I’ve been using as an artist to help you enhance your artistic endeavours.
Choosing Colours
Before I start buying any colours, it’s good to begin with the basics. This includes trying out singular testers to see what works with my style and the colours that I like to work with as an artist. A great way to build this up is by getting watercolour dot cards from various brands to see what you like. This way, you can observe how they mix with the current colours you already have in your palette and how they perform on their own before you invest in any additions to your collection.
Dot Sheets:
Winsor & Newton
Tube paints and solid pans are the two primary forms of watercolour pigments. Renowned brands like Winsor & Newton, Daniel Smith, and M. Graham offer high-quality tube paints, providing an extensive spectrum of colours for artists.
On a personal preference, I find that solid paints are easier to carry and take with you anywhere. If you have a favourite that comes in a tube, you can always fill these into little tubs and let them dry to carry with you.
Watercolour Pencils and Crayons
During my time as an illustrator, my exploration of textures has also taken me to using watercolour pencils and crayons. My current personal preference is the Lyra Aquacolour crayons, as you use them just as you would solid pans or draw directly on the page. They’re often brighter and a bit more fluid for my taste, which I love. However, I would, as always, try them both out to see what you like and what suits your way of working. Lyra is a cheaper brand, which is great for testing them out before you opt-in to buying the more expensive brands like Derwent, Faber-Castell, and Caran d'Ache. Watercolour crayons, such as Caran d’Ache Neocolor II, provide more pigments, and the lightfastness of them is apparently better than Lyra. If you are using the crayons to sketch out ideas or just working in your sketchbook, I would go with Lyra. But if you want to create work that you intend to hand/sell, I would invest in the slightly more expensive option.
Choosing Top Brands
Selecting the right brand is crucial for ensuring the quality, “lightfastness,” and longevity of your watercolour artwork. Professional-grade brands like Winsor & Newton, Daniel Smith, and Schmincke are renowned for their rich pigments and archival quality. By investing in these top-tier brands, you ensure your colours remain vibrant over time.
Conclusion
Overall, I would encourage experimentation, playing, testing, and building your collection. This way, you have some control over your palette, and giving yourself restrictions is so important to the work that you will go on to create. Sometimes less is more, and it's not always about having the biggest collection of paints and only using 4 of the colours in the palette. Although it's great to have a nice collection, I would say it's way better to have 8 colours that you LOVE and will pick and choose from as you develop your practice, rather than 20 colours of which you don’t use 70%.