Brand Overview is a series where multiple posters give their opinions on a brand. Thus far, we have covered Schmincke Horadam and Daniel Smith.
Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolour is a watercolor manufacturer from the United Kingdom. Their tube watercolors and their watercolor paints use a different formulation. The tube watercolors are not meant to be used to dry in pans. They dry really hard and are then harder to rewet than other brands. Their watercolor in pans are made with extruded paint cake, a formulation that works better for reactivating dried paint. They offer 109 colors in tubes (5 ml and 14 ml), 108 colors in half pans and 72 colors in full pans. 24 colors can also be bought in big 37 ml tubes. On their website they don’t tell if the watercolors are vegan or not.
You can support the blog by shopping with our affiliate links to Jackson’s US.
Our hot takes and favorite colors
Sandra
Winsor and Newton seem to be a boring brand. Old school even. For me they are not exciting. And the colors are hard to rewet when poured and dried from tubes. But they are still reliable and carry two of my all time favorites.
My favorites:
- Magnesium Brown, PY119, is a strong tinting opaque brown with a heavy granulation. I carry it in my travel palette instead of a burnt sienna. I love it for its texture. It doesn’t dry rock hard poured from a tube, as many other of their colors do. [Buy Magnesium Brown]
- Transparent Orange, DPP, is a strong tinting and very transparent orange. I carry it in my travel palette. It mixes reds with Quinacridone Rose, PV19, and pitch black with Ultramarine Blue, PB29. It can also be used to mix browns similar to burnt sienna. [Buy Transparent Orange]
- Smalt, PV15, is a unique shade of ultramarine violet. It’s a low tinting, deep violet leaning blue with a nice granulation. I don’t use it often, but I really like its color. [Buy Smalt]
Colors to avoid:
- Their dot card has the tiniest dots of them all. For some of the colors I couldn’t even get the masstone in my small swatches.
- Cobalt Violet, PV14, has the prettiest color and a heavy granulation. But it’s so low tinting and picking up paint from the dried tube paint takes ages. Both of these factors take the joy out of using it.
Logan
WN is a reliable pro-quality brand that can be found in most parts of the world, but it’s not my favorite because of its tendency to dry hard as a rock, especially from the tube. Their pan and tubes evidently use a different formulation, so if you don’t plan to use it fresh from tube, I suggest getting their pans. This is annoying because it makes WN less versatile than other brands, and not every color comes in a pan.
My favorites:
- Naples Yellow Deep (PBr24) is so buttery-smooth and a warm, cheerful hue. [Buy Naples Yellow Deep]
- Venetian Red (PR101) is a strong and earthy scarlet that’s a little more chromatic than other brands, orange-leaning enough to be distinguished from Indian Red, and red-leaning enough to be distinguished from Burnt Sienna. [Buy Venetian Red]
- Phthalo Turquoise (PB16) is a little muted and gets extra-dark in this brand. I like it as a lightfast Prussian Blue alternative that mixes great greens. [Buy Phthalo Turquoise]
Colors to avoid:
- The “Cadmium-Free” alternatives to Cadmium colors don’t list any pigments and many artists have found them to have poor lightfastness.
- Burnt Sienna (PR101) is oddly weak.
- Their dot card offers scant paint and not every color is represented.
Lynne
I grew up with Winsor Newton watercolors. My mother didn’t paint a lot with watercolor, but this is what we had in the house when I first experimented. When I began painting more consistently, I added what remained of my mother’s collection to my own initial professional purchases and still find certain pigments to be my preferred versions. Overall, I find their paint to be consistent and reliable, if not especially unique.
Favorite Colors:
- Cerulean Blue (PB35), a lovely light blue that is more transparent than many ceruleans. I seem to have a consistent leaning toward more transparent versions of pigments! At any rate, this one is a perfect one-stop sky color if you are someone who likes a little granulation in your skies. When out urban sketching I find it particularly useful, despite being able to reach a similar hue with PB29 and PG50. A color that keeps working its way back into my travel palette, and always the WN version. [Buy Cerulean Blue]
- Winsor Violet (PV23) is a deep blue-leaning violet that is very strong and staining as well as transparent. While I like most all of them…simply because they are purple, the WN version is my favorite as is a bit redder than some others and has slightly less of a drying shift. It plays a strong roll combined with brown to create mountain shadows or with sap green to create rusty olive hues. It is lovely to use for a gradient in a dark night sky. [Buy Winsor Violet]
- Payne’s Grey (PB15, PV19, PBk6) was once a staple in my palette and WN is still my go-to version. A workhorse on its own for monochrome paintings, it teams well with raw sienna (or yellow ochre) and burnt sienna to create wonderfully moody scenes. Lately I more often reach for an Indigo formulated without black which steps in nicely for the WN Payne’s Grey due to similarities as a dark green leaning blue neutral, but this is a keeper in my collection. [Buy Payne’s Grey]
Hanna
I use Winsor Newton pro watercolours a lot when traveling in the tropics. They are my go-to brand on humid days and during monsoon seasons, since they become wonderfully rewettable, (even the tube-filled pans) but not soupy. They are very frustrating for me in most European locations, however.
I have an unsupported fantasy that the reason for this is that WN paints were developed with the idea that British people were supposed to take them out to the colonies to document their journeys. (I have seen a lot of such watercolours in Asian museums.) But Britain has a lot of damp corners, so maybe it’s just that.
Anyway, the WN intro sets tend to be old-fashioned and (to me) boring, and I particularly dislike their fake cadmiums (more opaque than modern yellows, less velvety than real cadmiums, AND dubiously lightfast–what’s not to hate?) However, they do make good versions of many of the popular pigments, and also produce some very original paints, notably the Jewel collection they released in 2019, which contains PV19 violet (eh), PG26 (a pigment I love but have not tried in this brand) and my three favourites:
- Transparent Orange (DPP): a vibrant transparent orange, offered only by WN and Roman Szmal. Beautiful alone and a great mixer; if I could have only one orange, it would be this. [Buy Transparent Orange]
- Smalt (PV15): a bluer Ultramarine Violet that feels a lot like a mix between normal PV15 and PB29, both in hue and in strength. (It is stronger than a normal Ultramarine Violet, which means that it can mix with the medium-tinting paints in my palette without being easily overpowered.) It is a bit of a cloud specialist (I use it straight-up for some sunsets, dropping it into the bright sky, and in stormy mixes) but also, of course, a texturizer for neutral or cool mixes. [Buy Smalt]
- Aqua Green (phthalo-something): An unusual option for the cyan slot, darker, deeper, and slightly duller than PB16. Greener, too: its hue resembles those Marine mixers of PG7 and PB15 that some companies offered – but, shockingly, it offers mild granulation. I use it mostly to mix greens, but I just realized that it makes a moody granulating dark blue with Smalt. [Buy Aqua Green]