How to Select Watercolor Paints

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about how one would select watercolor paints. You can go into a hobby store and buy all kinds of kits and boxes of paints and so on, but I really encourage you to choose a few colors, use those colors, learn what they can do and then move on from there. But, in order to show you several different kinds of colors today, I'm going to expand the pondet and show you some things that I've done. First of all, you can buy what we call a small traveling kit, you can buy artist's colors or you can buy student's colors. This is something that when it's new it puts out and you can see the little boxes of paint. However, no paint, even the finest paint will work well if it's dry, so you've got to make things wet. And on this, you've got room to mix your colors. There are watercolor crayons and watercolor pencils that are very water soluble that I can put down on a, on a paper and I can still go over them with water, they're perfectly okay to put in any watercolor show. You can mix colors, you can fool around with them, wet and dry and so on. One of the best makers of watercolor media is Windsor Newton and they are an English company that have been in business for many, many years. This is for instance a burnt sienna color. Now it comes in tubes, the tubes lasts forever, you would put some of that into a palette. This kind of palette is something that would lasts forever, it's a gentle pipe palette, and you can dump a whole tube of paint into one of those holes if you like and you can use it, blend it, mix it, drop it, you know, blur it, whatever. But you really would be using probably a few kinds of paint that you would really stick with; an ultramarine blue is very important for skies. A permanent rose is a very nice color. And alizarin crimson, some people will buy black, but you can make with, say, alizarin crimson and green or sometimes a dark blue. You can make a really dark color that's very similar to a black and you'll have more luminousity and vigor, I think to that color, "that's a little bit too red". But you can see how light or how dark you can bring these colors in. The colors last for years and years, they're not flammable. You also can use acrylic colors that you can drop, when we say watercolor, primarily we're talking about transparent watercolor. But, I'm going to show you that you can also use acrylic color in much the same fashion as you would a watercolor. In some shows will allow some acrylics, some will not. But you can play with those, play with different colors. There's another group of paints that you can put, just as you see, we can put these paints in this palette, they're metal palettes as well. But this one packs very, very easily. This is easy for travel and that's the reason I bought it. Most of the colors in here, I have bought because someone said, "oh you should really try those color, you need those color", and I will mention one thing about transparent and opaque colors. In opaque color, even though it's a light color, like certain yellows, an opaque color will cover a transparent color. It's almost like rocks, paper, scissors; if you've got an opaque, you can go over the top, if you've got a transparent color, you will not be able to do that. Some of, even some dark colors are still transparent, but you can look around and see the difference as you try to play with your paints at the difference between opaque and transparent colors. So this is just a tiny bit of information that opens the door to the many choices, but I do request that you look carefully at what you buy. Don't get a whole set, buy a few colors, learn what they do and go on from there. I hope this is giving you some information that will be useful. This is Eileen Pestorius, till next time."