Supplies

Rating Watercolour Brush Names

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A warning: this article is no substitute for a good guide to watercolour brushes, something that would explain not just the shapes, but the different materials they are made of, the vocabulary used to discuss them, etc.

No, this is just a list of all the brush shape names I have encountered, ranked.

20 Student Grade Winsor Newton Cotman Watercolors Compared to Professional Grade

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In 2021, my watercolor journey started when I was gifted the Winsor & Newton Cotman student grade 20-color tube set. Now that I’ve used exclusively professional grade watercolors for years, I’ve started to lose touch with my memories of student grade. I decided that if I’m going to be recommending or disrecommending Cotman to beginners, I better know what I am talking about, so I picked up the same 20-color tube set that I started with. What do I think now??

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My Urban Sketching Kit as of Spring 2025

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Earlier this year, when I decided to get more serious about urban sketching, I put together a small kit based on my expectations of what would work well. Now that I have some experience, let’s judge how I did! With particular emphasis on critiquing my palette choices, since they are what I obsess about the most.

Color Substitutions for Claire Giordano’s Beginner Watercolor Course

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Edit: This post has been edited on June 7, 2025 to include more information about pans vs tubes and photos of student-grade Cotman substitutions.

I’m a member of Claire Giordano’s Adventure Art Academy, and I’m joining her Beginner/Foundations class starting June 12. Although a person who’s painted for four years and maintained a three-update-a-week watercolor blog for three of those years can probably not exactly be called a beginner, I still feel like a beginner in many ways – good and bad! When you’re chaotically self-taught, it’s always good to circle back to fundamentals, and my recent feelings of slump have had me yearning for structure and simplicity. I always learn a lot from Claire’s tips on water control, plein air shortcuts, and specific landscape elements, such as alpenglow.

The one aspect of painting where I don’t feel like a beginner is color mixing and pigment knowledge. Learning about pigments and paint options almost feels like a separate hobby, one where I’ve really dug in. I’d like to put that knowledge to work for my fellow students. 

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Artist Palette Profiles: Kazuo Kasai

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Kazuo Kasai is one of my favorite contemporary watercolor artists to follow on Instagram (before I left Instagram), and he has amazing timelapse videos on Youtube. Even accounting for the sped-up video, he paints so fast, slapping down paint as if at random, yet it all comes together. I love his fresh, bold color and the way his paintings are so intensely seasonal: spring bursting with blossoms; summer full of sunlight and greenery; autumn exploding with fall color; and winter cold and serene. 

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May greens keep changing!

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I’ve often struggled to find the “perfect spring green” and this year, I think I figured out the secret: there is no perfect spring green because spring greens keep changing!

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The New Holbein Granulating Artist Watercolours

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I recently picked up a sample of all twenty-four of Holbein’s new granulating watercolours. I was very curious about them, because I like Holbein paints and their mixes seemed different from those already offered by Schmincke. Daniel Smith, etc. In my excitement, I immediately swatched all the samples out, twice: once simply, with a gradient, … Read more

Artist Palette Profiles: Emma Lefebvre

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Emma Lefebvre is a popular social media watercolor teacher with a cheerful, illustrative style. She specializes in loose florals and cute paintings of food, such as cupcakes. I found her book, Watercolor Lessons, to be a fun, eye-catching intro that raises excitement about watercolor without bogging the reader down with too much technical detail. It would appeal to the beginner who is drawn to simplicity, color, illustration, and a bold, modern aesthetic. 

So what colors does Lefebvre recommend?

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