By Tess Myers, October 2025
Have you been thinking about watching the rich flow of color on paper lately? Or of creating luminous and transparent layers? Perhaps the atmospheric effects, delicate washes, or vibrant glazes of a painting have caught your eye. It may be time to give watercolor a go! Many are drawn to the versatility, practicality, spontaneity, and beauty of watercolor paints, and if you’ve made it to this page of the WSO website, I suspect you too may be interested.
But where to start? Navigating a whole Internet’s worth of information, blog posts, classes, and manuals can be daunting. The first questions that I tend to hear from prospective watercolorists are “What supplies do I need?” and “What should I paint first?. To that end, I’ve written up this short guide to help you find supplies that work for you, then some simple exploratory exercises that will introduce you to the rich and versatile qualities of watercolor paints.
A willingness to play and experiment will serve you well as you foray into this unique medium. There are many wonderful approaches to learning watercolor, some more intuitive and some more analytical. Everyone’s artistic journey looks different. The advice I give here is just one of many opinions, and I encourage you to seek out the resources that appeal most to you.
Supplies – What do I need to buy?
There is nothing wrong with trying out watercolor with a set of standard kindergarten non-toxic watercolors on inexpensive paper, just to get a feel for how the pigment and water and paper all interact. But I will caution you that materials can absolutely make or break your experience, and far too many beginners start out with inferior supplies and then blame themselves when they struggle to achieve their desired outcome. However, this doesn’t mean you need to run out and purchase a huge pile of top-quality materials. Some items in a watercolorists kit can be had for nearly free, and some should be carefully purchased. In my own experience, a minimal selection of the right high quality materials will serve a student best, both in the short and long term.
If you’re working with a budget, see if you have a used art supply store near you. Look for sample sizes of paint or dot cards, or borrow materials from a friend if you’re not sure you’re ready to buy your own.
Brushes
My controversial opinion is that you don’t need good quality brushes right away. You can cover a lot of ground with just a medium-sized round brush that comes to a fine tip. Chinese-style calligraphy brushes fit this profile and can often be found at quite a low price. Start off by working with a larger brush than you think you need, and use plenty of water. As you get a sense of what you like and what you want to be able to do, branch out into other brush styles.
When you’re ready for your first high quality brush, consider going for a mop brush made of squirrel or other high water capacity fiber.
Paint
Watercolor paint comes in various grades, ranging from very inexpensive children’s sets to student grade to professional quality pigments. A set of student-grade paints can be a good place to start, but my suggestion is to begin with just 4 tubes of good quality professional grade paint: A yellow, a red, a blue, and a dark (but not black) neutral value. For my portrait work, I like to use Phthalocyanin Blue, Quinacridone Red, Gamboge Yellow, and Payne’s Grey. See note on colors below.
Using high quality paint right off the bat will help you develop good technique, and it will be easier to get bright and vibrant colors. Working from the three primary colors will teach you about basic color theory, and, as a bonus, your paintings will feel naturally cohesive.
Tubes vs pans: Pre-filled pans of color are a popular starting point, and many appreciate the convenience of having their palette and paint all in one transportable box. Personally, I find it difficult to keep my pigments pure when using pans, and I prefer the flexibility of selecting only the colors I want to paint with rather than having to purchase a pre-defined set. Tubes can be a bit messier, but give you consistent purity and consistency of paint as well as the flexibility to use anything you want as a palette.
Paper
This is the one area where you absolutely shouldn’t skimp. Start off with good quality 100% cotton 140lb watercolor paper from a reputable brand like Windsor & Newton, Arches, or Saunders Waterford. Get a small block or palette of paper and give yourself permission to use it fearlessly. I recommend that my students use high quality paper even when practicing simple exercises. Those exercises become much easier when performed on good paper, and they end up having to use less paper for practice in the long run.
Blocks vs loose paper: Loose paper is versatile, but must be taped or stapled onto a flat surface to minimize buckling of the paper as it gets wet. Watercolor paper blocks consist of 20 or so sheets of paper, stacked and fused along the edges. Simply paint directly on the top sheet of the block, then detach this top sheet from the stack once you are done. The downside of using a block is that you only have one piece of paper to paint on at a time unless you remove sheets and treat them like loose paper. I find the convenience of blocks to be worthwhile, but you will likely want to make this choice based on your own work habits.
Other materials
No need to go premium on these things! A simple plastic palette (or retired dinner plate, in a pinch) will suffice. I save free takeout napkins to use as blotting rags and pull plastic tubs out of my recycling bin to use as wash water containers. As a step up from takeaway napkins, blue Shop Towels are superior to standard paper towels. They are more absorbent than cloth rags, but can be rinsed, dried, and reused many times.
Here’s the starter kit I would put together for a friend:
Rather than start my friend off with inexpensive materials they would then grow out of, this kit should continue to serve them well into any professional ventures they might make. I use these same products nearly every day in my work.
- A 9×12 W&N watercolor block
- A Princeton Velvetouch Series Synthetic Blend Brush, #12 Long Round
- Four tubes of M.Graham paint:
- Gamboge Yellow
- Phthalocyanine Blue
- Quinacridone Red
- Payne’s Grey
At the time of writing this article, I was able to find all these materials online for about $100. You could lower the cost of this minimal starter kit in three ways: first by using a more generic brush, then by trading out the paint, and finally by purchasing only a single full-size sheet of high quality paper and cutting it down to multiple smaller sheets. You can get away with a cheap brush, and cheap paints, but not cheap paper.
Disclaimer: There are plenty of other brands that make quality versions of these same products. I am not paid to make any product recommendations, these just happen to be materials that I use and trust.
Getting started
Now that you’ve got your paint, palette, brush, 100% cotton watercolor paper, wash water, and rag, what next? Here’s where that willingness to play and experiment comes in. To start off, you’ll want to get a sense for how watercolor paint behaves. It’s a unique medium, and is unlike the crayons, pens, and pencils that many of us grew up using. Rather than staying right where you put it, watercolor paint has a tendency to move around and mix with other colors on the paper. This rambunctious nature can give us gorgeous soft edges and organic fluidity, but it can take a little bit of practice to wrangle.
I often hear people say they find watercolor to be unpredictable. This is an understandable impression. But much like weather, the behavior of watercolor becomes straightforward to predict once you understand what factors influence the outcome. The amount of water that you use –on your brush, on the paper, and mixed in with your paint– will determine how your paint behaves and where pigment flows. Small variables such as the temperature and humidity of the air can change how your paper dries. Even the chemical characteristics of the pigments you use will affect how those particles move and diffuse on paper and through water.
Given this complexity, my preferred approach is simply to play and explore. First, just mess around and see what happens. Load a damp brush with some color and dab it on the paper. See what shapes your brush can make. Notice how different colors blend with each other. Give yourself permission to use lots of color, lots of water, and take up lots of space on the paper.
You may soon find that you get surprisingly different results when you vary the consistency of the paint on your brush, and when you paint on a dry area of the paper vs a saturated vs a damp area. Try changing these variables one at a time and see if you can start to predict outcomes:
- What happens when a brush loaded with medium-consistency paint lands on dry paper?
- What about an area of the paper that has been pre-wet with clean water?
- And an area that has begun to dry and is now barely damp?
- How about on an area that was pre-wet with another color of medium-consistency paint?
- And what happens when you let a painted area dry fully, then paint another layer over it?
Next, play with how concentrated your paint is, both on your brush and on your paper.
- What happens when you add more concentrated paint to an area already wet with paint?
- What happens when you add less concentrated paint (or even just pure water) to an area already wet with paint?
Try these trials out with different colors and in different combinations. You may even want to take notes! Conveniently, you’ve got a nice sheet of paper right there in front of you. With some experimentation and plenty of practice, you should begin to develop a strong understanding of how watercolor behaves and how to achieve specific effects. More importantly, you’ll gain experience maintaining your sanity while navigating a certain amount of chaos. I would say it is a fool’s errand to try to gain complete control over watercolor, but we can certainly learn how to collaborate with it to great effect.
Some general tips
- Rather than think of your brush as an applicator of color, think of the brush as a conduit for water, and the water as the pathway for color.
- Paint generally looks much darker and more saturated when wet, so use plenty of color and don’t judge the painted area until it’s dry.
- Resist overworking an area and see what you can do with just a few strokes or dabs of the brush. Leave these areas alone until they dry.
Don’t worry too much about creating representational art right off the bat. Give yourself plenty of time to just sink into the vast and complex world that exists between your brush and the paper.
Happy painting!
Note on colors
Printers and designers may notice that my recommended palette is not truly a Red-Yellow-Blue palette! While I often refer to these colors as their primary look-alikes, the four pigments I listed are actually closer to the printer’s CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (dark) – palette. These colors mix particularly well to create luminous and pure secondary colors like purples, oranges, and greens.