Should beginners get watercolor pans or tubes?

Traditionally, watercolor paint comes in one of two forms, pans or tubes. An early decision you have to make when getting into the hobby is to decide which format you want. This decision can feel weighty because it feels like it locks you into a specific way of working, but you don’t know the hobby well enough yet to decide! In this post, I’ll lay out all the considerations to give you a basis for deciding.

What are pans and tubes?

There are also some more unusual types of watercolor such as liquid watercolor (similar to ink) and sheets (generally used for special detail work, like photo retouching). I’m less familiar with these, and they’re less common.

Size Options

Pan sizes

Some brands offer non-standard size pans. For example, Art Toolkit palettes are extra-small for portability with extra flat pans; their largest pan holds about 1 ml. Tonic watercolor by St. Louis Art Supplies offers giant ceramic pans with 20 grams of solid watercolor (about 15 ml liquid equivalent).

Tube sizes

You can see that when you buy tubes, you’re usually buying more paint at a time. For this reason, tubes are often more expensive than pans, but cheaper per ml of paint.

Sample Sizes/Dot Cards

Dot cards are a great invention if you want to try new paints. It’s literally cardstock with dots of dry paint on it. Many brands put these out to allow artists to sample different colors. The dots may only be enough to do a few swatches or a small painting, but it’s enough to get a general feel for the color before you commit to a pan or tube.

Working wet vs. dry

Most artists have a preference for whether they generally work from wet paint, straight from the tube, or from dry pans.

• Pros of working with wet paint fresh-from-tube: Wet paint is more easy to get vibrant and easier to use in large amounts, such as in large works or when using colors with weaker tinting strength (including student grade).
• Pros of working with dry pans: Pans are more portable; they don’t spill, and can be easily taken along for travel and outdoor painting. There is less waste because any paint you use, simply remains in the pan and dries again for next time.

If you prefer to work from wet paint, you of course need to buy tubes. But if you like to work from dry pans, you can buy either format! You can buy premade pans, or it’s also common to make your own dry pans from tube paint.

Making your own pans

A common way of working is to buy tubes, and then make your own pans by squeezing a little paint from the tube into an empty pan and letting it dry overnight.

Here’s a process video on filling pans in an Art Toolkit.

Why would I make my own pans?

There are a few advantages to working this way instead of buying pans to begin with:

• Flexibility. It allows you to still use wet paint if you want to. It also allows you to use non-standard pan sizes, such as those from Art Toolkit, or a ceramic palette.
• Cost at volume. Tubes are more cost-effective in the long run since you are buying more paint at once. (Note that the cost savings presupposes that you know what colors you want. What if you buy a 15 ml tube, paint with it a few times, and decide you don’t like it? It doesn’t matter than the paint was cheaper per milliliter if you don’t use all the milliliters.)
• Convenience at volume. If you use a lot of a particular color, it’s more convenient to periodically fill a pan from a tube than to keep buying more pans when you run out.

Why wouldn’t I make my own pans?

There are also some good reasons to prefer to buy your paint as pans, though:

• Simplicity. It’s easier to skip a step, isn’t it?
• Premade set availability. Premade paint sets are more often available in pans. This can be a low barrier to getting started, because you don’t have to pick your own colors.
• Brand/availability. Some brands only offer pans. This is especially common for small, handmade makers.
• Differences in formulation. In most professional brands I am familiar with, there appears to be little to no difference in formulation between wet and dry paint – the pan paint is just tube paint that they let dry. But some brands say their formulas are different. Winsor & Newton pans are “formulated to be easier to rewet,” according to this video from WN, as well as “compressed using thousands of pounds of pressure” to be more concentrated, according to a conversation reported in a 2019 forum post.
• Student grade. My finding has been that that student grade paints tend not to work well with the methodology of making your own dry pans (at least not in Winsor Newton Cotman, the student grade I’m most familiar with; though this may be a brand thing.) The Cotman paints just feel different and not as strong after drying and rewetting. If you plan to use Cotman paints, I would suggest getting premade pans if you want to work dry, or working wet with tube paint.

Mix-and-match

If you tend to use pans in standard pan sizes, you can mix-and-match: I have palettes that contain some some premade pans and some pans that I made myself from tube paint in standard-size empty pans.

Conclusion

Personally, my preference is to buy tubes and make my own dry pans. Flexibility is the main reason. I’m often rearranging my palette, using non-standard pan sizes, and occasionally even experiment with working from wet, so it just gives me more options.

I do also have some colors in premade pans, however! I will sometimes opt for premade half-pans when I’m trying out a new color or brand I’m not sure about, since I can get less paint at once. Of course, if I can get a dot card, that’s an even more economical option, especially if I want to try a lot of colors.

If you are a beginner, know that the tubes-vs-pans decision is not going to lock you into anything forever. Paint gets used up, and you’ll have more chances to make an informed decision about whether you want to change your format. It’s common to start with a premade set of pans, and then buy tubes to refill the colors you love enough to use up.