There are various cheaper brands, but they cost differently depending on the country.
I know Mijello, Turner, Shin Han, MGraham and
Jacksonart’s own brand.
Mijello has a pure pigment set which I think is well put together.
Too bad there are no sets with 5-8 tubes for beginners who are well put together.

Brian, thank you. Have to admit, Da Vinci watercolors are tempting at that size and price. I once read on handprint.com that tube watercolors are up to 50% water. Based on this wouldn’t Daniel Smith watercolors sticks be more economical actually? What are your thoughts on this?

They are in many cases better than other brands, their earth trio plus ultramarine are my favorite, plus their yellow ochre is actually a nice yellow in tints, other brands are duller. My suggestion is get many brands, never let yourself just buy from one until you find your favorite versions of each pigment.

Demo artists hired for our workshops only use one brand if there is a sponsorship, even then its clear they use a variety of brands. Some describe it as a united nations of colors. Lot of top artists use da vinci ( also called american journey ) simply since its cheaper and very high quality, those 37mL tubes at $15 each really make a difference.

On sticks, They are half as big and nearly as expensive, some do this, but you should start with tubes. Only after you get rich color focus on sticks and pans.

Ah the never-ending search for the “right” dark browns and neutrals.

Yeah, I posted a whole thread on the subject https://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1475654 in order to start my shopping trip for one or another. Thanks to info in that thread, I initially thought that I wanted, IIRC, M Graham Neutral Tint or QoR Neutral Tint, on the premise that I didn’t want any mixture which had a black pigment in it (and also didn’t want a Sepia or an Indigo at all.)

But now I’m rethinking my strategy and don’t know what I will shop for, or if I will actually buy anything or not. Mixing your own darks and neutralizers is also an excellent strategy. Similarly, all the earth tones in the less saturated oranges, yellows, and reds zone (well, call ’em “browns” or what-not) are often mixed pigments which manufacturers have given traditional color names (often named after a certain region’s land, viz., Cassel Earth, Mars Red, Indian Red, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, etc.). These, too, I’m wondering about … I can certainly make my own for these earth tones too, but I won’t end up with the same effect as I would when making my own neutralizing darks.

That’s because, in my own (weird?) head-space, I think earth tones are different from neutralizers. Does that make sense?

Basically, I think of the neutralizing darks as, really, only three or four distinct hues — all are dark, very low in chroma (very close to grey) but very high in saturation (very much pigmentation in the paint). Going by more traditional names, there is a blue one (Indigo), a green one (Payne’s Grey), and a few brownish and reddish ones (Neutral Tint, Sepia, Van Dyke Brown, some of the earths, etc.), a very neutral one (Jane’s Grey), etc.. Each one of these, in my mind, was INVENTED (or ADOPTED INTO watercolor) for the purpose of being a neutralizer. For mixing. Whereas I think of the earth-tones as a much wider range of intersecting and overlapping hues, mostly hues that represent the natural world’s own natural minerals, and therefore of colors which PRE-EXISTED the artist. What I’m saying here, is, roughly, for my mind, in painting and other color-oriented art, the “neutralizer” was a human construct, invented for the purpose of making a certain effect (neutralizing) in a painting; whereas the “earth tone” is a natural phenomenon, adopted from the real world into the artist’s world as it is, status mostly unchanged. Or, so it FEELS to me.

Consequently, “mixing” my own earth-tones seems somehow to miss the point, whereas mixing my own neutralizers (according to my admittedly rather idiosyncratic definition, above) seems a bit more appropriate.

Well, that’s just an excursion into my own weird head-space, didn’t mean to complicate matters too much …

I suggest this set: https://www.dickblick.com/items/01767-1009/%5B/URL%5D It’s the most sensible set I have seen. It’s a quite decent value. (I agree with Brian – DaVinci or American Journey are usually the best deal, in the U.S., per ml.) And it gives beginners a place to start. The tubes are small, so it isn’t a huge commitment, but it is a solid foundation. I would add a tube of burnt sienna (Transparent Red Oxide, in the DS range is my favorite, as it is a bit oranger). That’s it. You can use some of these colours for monotones, if you like, or mix the ultramarine with the burnt sienna. I don’t think beginners should be afraid of colour, but having a lot of them isn’t necessary and can be confusing. (Honestly, I would gladly paint for a year, with just those seven colours, myself!) Then, you can form opinions on what colours you like and what you want to change or add. If you prefer a different starting palette, with colours more spread out on the colour wheel, go for it! Six tubes and a neutral (I strongly recommend brown, for mixing with blue) and you are good to go!

Have fun!

Noelle

I don’t yet own a set of watercolor paint (I’m currently content with my watercolor pencils, gouache, and acrylic paints), but I will be wanting to get one. To that end, I’ve done quite a bit of research into my choices and have narrowed it down to Daniel Smith Extra Fine Watercolors. A set of six of them (warm and cool red, blue, and yellow) are within your price range, are also available as open stock (along with hundreds of other colors), don’t smell (according to posts here on Wet Canvas), are professional quality, don’t use fillers, and are very light-fast. That all sounds really good to me, so I’ve got them on my wish list so I can just click and grab them when the mood strikes. You might want to try them, too.

My advice? Don’t make my mistake. I bought every pigment I could get my hands on. But it’s silly to try to buy the entire rainbow. Fun, but unnecessary, and therefore potentially a waste of time and money.

Well, it’s not so bad. I am glad to have done so, for I get to experiment with a lot of new pigments. But it didn’t really teach me much about painting. If you want to have a good background in materials-science type information about pigments, then, go ahead and buy a bunch of pigments. I have somewhere around 75 or 80 different tubes of single-pigment paints, various brands, some paints that have the same pigments from different manufacturers, some pigments that can’t be found easily any more, some pigments that only come from one manufacturer. I use about six of them.

Buying pigments teaches you about pigments. It doesn’t really teach you about painting. Well, sure, there is some small impact on learning to paint, but having extra tubes of pigments has only about a 5% impact on your painting skill. For example, seeing several granulating pigments do their granulation thing, is a good experience, for helping you to understand what exactly Ultramarine Blue is doing when it granulates. But you can probably accomplish that knowledge about Ultramarine Blue without also buying two Cobalts in the greens or turquoises range and also a Van Dyke Brown made with NBr9. Those are also granulating; and yes, I know something intuitive about granulation by comparing Ultramarine Blue’s granulation to their granulation, but I’m probably only going to end up painting with Ultramarine Blue, so I don’t really need all those extra greens and turquoises and browns for any other purpose except for the purpose of owning them, themselves, and comparing them to … to what? … to each other, I guess. And then I never paint with them. Or, if I do, it’s because I ran out of whatever else was my standard in that range (f.e. a PR101 brown). In other words, I could have stayed with that standard and bought a second tube of it, thus increasing my knowledge of it rather than starting again at zero with a second pigment in that range. Distraction.

So I suggest, unless you are really interested in materials science in of and for itself and independent of painting skill, don’t buy the rainbow. Pick no more than (X?) some number of COLORS (probably with an eye to maximizing the width of your gamut across the whole color-wheel), then learn which PIGMENTS would be best to represent them, and stick to that plan for a while. I can’t tell you what the number X should be — forty seems way too high (though forty is a number which comes to mind because it would probably be wise to get only pigments which count among Bruce MacEvoy’s “top forty pigments” from Handprint-dot-com); whereas merely six seems a teeny bit low; so, just, umm?, somewhere in between, depending on budget, availability, etc..

But what do I know? I’m a beginner like you. I do not regret buying all those paints, and I’ll certainly keep and eventually use them. They add up to a large expense in past purchases which now sit idly on a shelf in my house, but the mad oniomania for pigments didn’t actually interfere with any other (perhaps more important) purchases, so, no harm = no foul? I guess …

In retrospect, I realize now, I was simply mildly misinformed. I somehow got the idea, that possessing a HUGE NUMBER of different pigments, would be a better way to know about pigments. But that’s probably inaccurate, because ownership of large numbers of extraneous pigments is probably not the best way to learn about your own specific pigments for your own specific painting purposes. I don’t really think I even knew that I had that idea. It was just an assumption — gotta learn more! therefore, must buy more! — fostered by the sight of art store inventory. There it was on the shelf. Had to buy it! Glad I have them all, but now I realize, they were a side-track, an excursion into something other than painting. My excursion into the materials-science of pigments became a year or two distraction from so much else about learning to paint.

So many other things to master: brush skill, palette management, water-to-paint ratios, good versus bad paper, paper seizing and surfaces, seeing color variation, matching color when mixing, abstracting in order to stop trying to match color, the difference between ambiently lighted color and local color, seeing the big shapes, painting background washes to flavor the light without caring about the details, keeping a wash alive with Mister Bead’s help, etc. etc. …