The whole kit: six colors, two brushes, water
Here is the arc of the next few sessions, so you know where today fits. Today: supplies, and only supplies. Next time: flat washes, and how water actually moves across paper. After that: mixing your six colors into every other color you'll need. Then layering, wet-on-wet, and one small finished piece to take home. Get the kit right today and each lesson after it goes smoother, so work through this list before you buy anything.
The complete list of what you need:
- Six watercolor half-pans. Not the 48-color rainbow set. The big sets look like a better deal; for a beginner, they are not.
- Two brushes. One round, one flat.
- Water. Two containers — one for clean, one for rinsing. Tap water is fine, our hard water included. It has never ruined one of my paintings, and I have made plenty of bad ones.
- Paper. Cheap stuff. Paper weight matters more than the paint does, which is covered below.
That is the entire kit. If someone at the store tries to upsell you a 48-pan set with a name-brand mascot on it, decline politely and walk away.
Why six colors and not more
The reason is decision load. Forty-eight little pans and your brain locks up deciding which one is "right" for the tree. Six colors removes that problem: you mix instead. Mixing is the actual skill — knowing that this blue plus a little of that yellow gets you the foothills-in-August color is worth more than owning a pan labeled "sage."
My six, in order of what to look for:
- a warm red
- a cool red
- a yellow
- a blue
- a second blue, if the set includes one
- something brown or earthy
If your set names them differently, don't stress; we'll sort it out in class. What matters is having a warm and a cool of each primary-ish color, not the exact names.
Paper: buy cheap first
Buy cheap paper before anything nicer. I spent forty dollars on artist-grade cold-press paper before I could paint anything worth putting on it, then was too scared to touch it for months because I didn't want to "waste" it. That is backwards. Right now you want to waste paper, and a lot of it. Get a pad of student-grade watercolor paper and go through it like scratch paper. Upgrade once you're comfortable, not before.
One technical requirement: use actual watercolor paper, not printer paper — even the cheap watercolor stuff. Printer paper buckles into a potato-chip shape the second water hits it. My very first wash ever proved it: I grabbed regular paper and watched it warp into something that belonged in a bag of chips, not a frame. I taped the next piece down and it still buckled a little. Eventually I decided buckled paper was part of my personality and moved on. You can skip that whole phase for the extra two dollars of paper made for this.
Check the label for "140lb." That number is paper weight, and it's the difference between paper that shrugs off water and paper that turns into oatmeal.
Two brushes is genuinely enough
- Round brush: your workhorse — washes, details, filling in shapes, all of it.
- Flat brush: good for skies, big open areas, straight-ish edges.
Skip the 12-brush set for the same reason you skip the 48-pan set: too many tools, too much deciding, not enough painting.
Water: more important than people think
Two containers, one clean and one dirty. When the clean water starts looking like the dirty water, dump it and refill. This sounds obvious until you're forty minutes into a painting and everything is coming out the color of dishwater because you never changed the cup.
One safety note: don't drink out of the water cups. With kids around my house it has come up more than once, so if you're painting with grandkids or nieces and nephews, watch the cups. Watercolor pigment is not something you want a toddler sipping.
Where the bar for "finished" actually sits
People turn perfectionist about this before they've even opened the set, so here is the real standard. I have never entered a painting in a show, framed one, or sold one. The best outcome any of my paintings has reached is one sky wash taped to the fridge with a magnet from a pizza place, and it's still there. That is the ceiling in my house: a magnet and some fridge real estate. If your painting ends up there too, you did it right.
So don't buy nice paper waiting to make something fridge-worthy. Buy the cheap stuff, make a mess, and let the good one surprise you.
Before next time: grab your six colors, two brushes, and a cheap pad of actual watercolor paper (140lb, student grade is fine) so we can get water on it together. Don't practice anything yet. Just get the supplies.