A simple guide to basic art supplies

Deciding which art supplies to buy is never easy! Whether you are starting from scratch and there's an overwhelming amount of choice but you don't know what you will actually use; or if you are more experienced and want to buy the best, or most reliable, version of a particular product. 

I recommend deciding on your budget, and how much you will be using the product, before buying a whole studio's worth of supplies that end up collecting dust! With paints, start with primary colours and add more as you feel you need, or want them. There are so many colours you can mix from primaries!

This is a brief guide, with links to more extensive and detailed articles. 
At the moment, it's just paper, watercolour paint and acrylics.

Paper

I use mixed media paper for nearly everything! This a brand I often return to:

Day to day, I use A4, but I also have A3 - and A1 on hand! The paper is 250gsm cartridge paper. 

For my handmade sketchbooks, and for supplies in workshops, I tend to use a 140gsm or 170gsm cartridge paper.

Watercolour

This is a good article from a website I use to get a lot of my art supplies. It explains the difference between different grades of watercolour paints. Near the end of the post are links to other blog posts, including how to use watercolour pencils and a guide to watercolour paper:

Which are the best watercolour paints? Blog post on Artist Discount website

I'm not going to go into watercolour brushes here, but here is a comprehensive article from aonther favourite art supplies website:

Watercolour brush guide. Posted on Jackson's Art website 

Here is an incomplete guide to my art supplies! 

For workshops:

These are very affordable. The tims usually have 12 or 24 colours, and are the staple of school art departments. These paints are low cost but still produce a good range of strong colours despite being low in pigment, the texture can be a bit chalky.

What I used to use:

I think these would be described as Student Grade. It's the 2020's version of a couple of sets I have had kicking around for decades. With these you can create washes, paint wet in wet and produce more translucent layers colours than with the basic set.

From the website: Winsor & Newton Cotman Sketchers' Pocket Set is a pocket-sized plastic box with white integral palette, 12 Cotman half pans, and a pocket brush.

It is a superb introductory set or an amazingly compact travel set for the artist on the go. A fantastic item to couple with a refillable water brush pen and a watercolour sketchbook, for truly compact and highly portable painting in any situation, space or environment imaginable.

I'm not recommending W&N above other brands, it's just that I have used them and found them to be good. Using websites like the ones I have linked to above, you will find a variety of brands at similar prices and similar quality.

I now use:

So, I don't have this particular set, but I use this brand. They were recommended in an online artists group I was part of a few years ago, and I haven't looked back.

I buy the paint in tubes and squeeze it out into my little travel palette where they dry and I reactivate them with water. If I'm doing a large piece at home, I use the paints straight from the tube.

They are described as:

• Professional artists quality with the finest pigments
• Maximum amount of pigment
• Re wets quickly and easily
• Perfect selection for beginners or as a small travel palette

Acrylics

This is a great guide to acrylic paints and painting.

As with watercolours, and many things in life, you get tend to get what you pay for.

Artist grade acrylic paints have higher levels of single pigment colour.

Lower grade paints - for students, and budget ranges have more fillers and additives

I tend to use System 3 by Daler Rowney which are student quality, but do the job I need them to very well. I use Magenta, process yellow and process cyan to mix all my colours, alongside titanium white and sometimes black. A limited number of colours that I mix myself makes it more economical and more satisfying!