Water question

[Hy!]

New here, please don’t judge. Does water purity matter? I mean in the sense that my tap water is very hard, can it affect the quality of my watercolors? TIA guys!

[Yorky Administrator Ormskirk]

Yes, some poor quality tap water can affect some pigments, but I live in the UK and use tap water with no problems.

Doug

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[Blanchette91]

Minerals that cause water hardness actually impact the texture of the resulting watercolor, and evidently the color, not only the “feel”. You’ll get quite a cloudy aspect on the canvas too, might not be that ok for what you have in mind. Limescale water isn’t the sole issue, though, as in households that use softeners for the purpose of reducing water hardness, if these systems use salt to bring down hardness, you’ll end up mixing the colors with saltwater. This has a similar effect in the sense that it sort of thins out the color, hope I’m expressing the phenomenon accurately. This is why most prefer to use distilled water or at least water that has been passed through filtration first.

https://marsocial.com/2020/05/08/painting-and-water-quality-does-hard-water-affect-the-quality-of-watercolor-paints/

https://www.optimainstitute.com/water/alkaline-water-ionizer.html

[tiago.dagostini]

On other hand, when I tried to use only destiller water aI ended up  destroying  a lot of paint because mold would grow   much more easily  then.  The clorine in most tap water keeps mold away.  So it might be  worth to  not use 100% destilled water.

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