My favorite watercolor supplies

I am so excited to share with you some of my favorite watercolor supplies! My hope is that this blog post is helpful whether you're a total beginner or more advance artist. I am always interested to see what supplies other creatives are loving! Just a small disclaimer - these are the supplies that I love, these are not required supplies for starting or experimenting with watercolors - always buy within your budget! 

I am always here if you have any questions - feel free to reach out to me via email at hello@maizie-clarke.com

Happy painting!

Paints / Mediums

For everyday painting, I prefer tube watercolors. I like the ability to create my own palette. Tube watercolors come out in a thick liquid form, be sure to dilute with water - remember with watercolors: it's always easier to layer on more colors than to take color away. My go-to brand is Daniel Smith.

For travel, I love watercolor pencils. You can use these in a variety of ways: straight to paper like regular colored pencils or coloring the paper and then painting over with a water wet paint brush. But the way I use them when traveling is to color on a scrap piece of watercolor paper to create a palette, using a wet brush you can activate the colors and paint.

Paper

If you wander the aisles of an art supply store you'll notice several options when it comes to watercolor paper: cold press, hot press, watercolor block, watercolor pad, etc. I prefer cold press paper that is 140lb - cold press paper has a rougher texture, where hot press has a smoother paper texture. I like a watercolor block because this keeps the paper stretched until you are ready to use a palette knife to slide underneath to detach the paper.

Brushes

I work pretty small, so my brushes are on the smaller size - pay attention to how it feels when you paint - are you having a hard time covering big areas? Move up in brush size. Is it hard to get the finer details? Move down in brush size. I love synthetic sable or squirrel brushes.

There a couple of tools that will always be with me when painting:

Masking fluid - this is a liquid product that you apply to areas of your painting that you want to keep white (we typically don't use white paint in watercolor - we maintain the white space of our paper for our true white). Let dry, and paint over the area. Once your paint is dry, use a rubber cement eraser to pull up the dried masking fluid. A word of caution : test you paper and masking fluid before using it on your final piece - you could damage the surface of the paper.

Rulers / T-Square - if you are drawing and painting subjects that feature a lot of straight lines, I like have rulers, t-squares and straight edges handy. A t-square is helpful with a watercolor block since the top of the 't' will catch the edge of the watercolor block to give you true horizontal and vertical lines.

Eraser shield - this is a tool that I first learned about in college in an architectural drafting class - it allows you to isolate an area in your drawing to erase.