Supplies for Getting Started with Watercolor Painting

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m John Junger. I do the paintings that we’re going to be talking about, the watercolors. I’m here representing expertvillage.com. In this first video, what I would like to do is show you some of the materials that are used in doing practically any artwork, but specifically for watercolor. One of the things that I tell my students is that, unfortunately, students usually don’t have the big bucks to buy the best equipment, but buy the best equipment you can afford to buy. Finding the watercolor paper and the watercolors themselves is half of the battle. I would have difficulty using some of the cheap materials that you can buy in dime stores and so forth, because they don’t handle properly. The brushes I buy are not necessarily the most expensive brushes, but they do the job for me. When you get into a brush like this, this is a Boartz size 10 wash brush. It has a lot of red sable hair, which is kind of expensive to some by, but it’s a good investment and one that will last you for life if you have the bucks to buy one. They’ve come out with a lot of various brushes. This is Robert Simon’s brush that is synthetic hair. It does a very good job for it’s made to do; flat washes, large areas of color. This is kind of, as you can see, that it’s been well used. However, it has a mixture of red sable hair and synthetic hair. Sometimes, it’s animal hair that they mix with it. Kolinsky red sable is the best kind of brush you can possibly buy. One of the reasons is that when it’s wet, it’ll spring back. Most brushes, when they’re dry will spring back, but when they’re wet, they’ll just flatten out and stay this way. So, it’s really good to have a brush that you’re not fighting when you’re not using it. There are all kinds of sizes. Basically, this is a 3 inch. It’s about as large as I need for the kind of watercolors I do. They come all the way down to little small brushes like this. This is for making lines into your wash. It’s just plastic wedge. You should also have a soft, like a HB pencil to do some light drawing so you know where you’re going to lay in your color. You can do just about anything you want do with a good red sable #5 brush, but there are smaller more detailed brushes if you want to purchase them."