Watercolour for Beginners: Choosing Your First Paints
Are you confused about where to start with watercolour? You're in good company. Walk into any art shop and you'll find pans and tubes, student-grade and artist-grade, sets of 12 and sets of 48, half pans and whole pans — and almost no guidance on what any of it means for someone just picking up a brush for the first time. This guide sorts out the basics and introduces the two ranges we'd recommend to most beginners: Sennelier L'Aquarelle and Wallace Seymour Vintage Watercolours.
Tubes or pans: what's the difference?
Both tubes and pans contain the same kind of paint — pigment bound in a gum arabic medium — but they behave differently in use.
Pans are small solid or semi-solid blocks that you activate with a wet brush. They're compact, portable, and great for working on location. Half pans are the standard size for most sets; whole pans give you more paint for colours you use heavily. The downside is that getting a strong, saturated wash from pans takes more brush loading than tubes do, which can be frustrating if you're working large or need intense colour quickly.
Tubes are squeezed out onto a palette in small amounts before each session. They give you more paint faster, make it easier to mix large washes, and tend to suit studio work or larger-scale painting. The trade-off is that squeezed-out paint can dry on the palette if you don't use it, and wet tubes have a way of going everywhere if you're not careful.
Most beginners do well starting with either. Pans suit the learner who wants to paint at the kitchen table or out in the garden; tubes suit someone who wants to work bigger or explore mixing from the start.
Artist-grade vs student-grade
Student-grade watercolours use less expensive pigments, often with fillers to stretch the paint further. They're usable, and many beginners learn perfectly well with them. But they can make learning harder: colours can be muddy, pigments can be less lightfast, and you sometimes end up fighting the paint rather than learning from it.
Artist-grade paints use higher-quality, purer pigments in higher concentrations. The colours are more vibrant, they mix more cleanly, and the results are genuinely better. The price difference is real, but so is the difference in what you can achieve. A small set of artist-grade colours will take you further than a large set of student-grade ones.
Our honest recommendation: start with a small artist-grade set rather than a large student-grade one. Six to twelve well-chosen colours at a proper quality level will teach you more about colour mixing and watercolour behaviour than twenty-four colours that fight you.
Sennelier L'Aquarelle
Sennelier is a Parisian colour house with roots going back to 1887, and L'Aquarelle is their artist-grade watercolour line. It has a devoted following for good reason: the pigment load is exceptional, the colours are luminous and clean, and there's a honey-like quality to the medium (Sennelier famously add honey to their watercolours to improve flow and keep the paint workable) that makes them a genuine pleasure to use.
L'Aquarelle is available in both tubes and half pans, which makes it unusually flexible. If you're not sure which format suits you, the half pan sets are a good starting point — compact, tidy, and easy to travel with. The tube range suits anyone who wants to work larger or mix bigger washes.
The pigment quality means that Sennelier colours mix cleanly without going muddy, which is enormously helpful when you're learning. Watercolour is all about understanding how colours interact, and better pigments give you clearer feedback on what's working and what isn't.
If Sennelier sounds like the right starting point, come and have a look at what we have in stock →
Wallace Seymour Vintage Watercolours
Wallace Seymour is a British colour house that takes a different approach: their Vintage Watercolour range is formulated using historical pigment recipes, many of them pre-dating the synthetic pigment era. The result is a palette that feels genuinely different from modern watercolours — slightly more muted, with a warmth and complexity that suits botanical illustration, landscape, and traditional watercolour subjects particularly well.
The Vintage range comes in Series A, B, and C, reflecting the different cost of the underlying pigments. Series A uses the most accessible pigments; Series C uses rarer and more expensive ones. For a beginner, Series A gives you excellent quality at a very reasonable price point, and you can build your palette upwards as your practice develops.
If you're drawn to a more traditional, naturalistic aesthetic — if the kind of painting you want to do involves landscapes, plants, or historical subject matter — Wallace Seymour is worth exploring before you default to a more modern colour range. The palette reflects the way painters worked before modern synthetic pigments arrived, and there's a coherence to it that makes colour mixing intuitive once you're used to it.
What else do you need to get started?
A palette for mixing — either a dedicated watercolour palette with wells, or a white ceramic plate. A selection of brushes: a large round (size 10 or 12) for washes, a medium round (size 6 or 8) for general work, and a smaller round (size 2 or 4) for detail. Watercolour paper — this matters more than most beginners expect. Cheap paper will buckle, absorb unevenly, and resist lifting, all of which makes learning harder. A 300gsm cold press paper is the standard recommendation for beginners. And water — two jars is better than one, so you always have clean water to hand.
You don't need much to start. Six to eight colours, two or three brushes, and good paper will take you a very long way.
Frequently asked questions
How many colours do I need to start with?
Six to twelve is plenty. A primary triad — a warm and cool version of red, yellow, and blue — gives you the ability to mix almost any colour. Adding a few convenience colours (a ready-mixed green, an earth tone, a neutral) makes working faster. More colours than this before you understand mixing basics can actually slow your learning down.
What paper should I use?
At minimum, use a dedicated watercolour paper rather than drawing paper or printer paper. 300gsm cold press is the standard recommendation for beginners — it has enough texture to hold the paint and enough weight to resist heavy buckling. Hot press paper (smoother) suits detailed work; rough paper suits loose, expressive styles. Cheap paper is the single thing most likely to make your early efforts look worse than they should.
Is Sennelier L'Aquarelle suitable for absolute beginners?
Yes. Artist-grade paint is more forgiving to learn with, not less, because the pigments are purer and the colours mix more predictably. The only caveat is cost: start with a small set of the colours you know you'll use rather than buying a large set all at once.
What's the difference between the Wallace Seymour series?
Series A, B, and C reflect the cost of the pigments used rather than a difference in quality. All three series are formulated to the same standard; the series simply indicates how rare or expensive the underlying pigment is. Series A is the most accessible price point and a perfectly sensible starting place.
Can I mix Sennelier and Wallace Seymour on the same palette?
Absolutely. Different brands of watercolour are generally compatible, and mixing across ranges is common practice. If you find you love the historical pigments in Wallace Seymour but also want the luminosity of a particular Sennelier colour, there's nothing stopping you using both.
Do I need to varnish a finished watercolour?
No. Watercolour is traditionally left unvarnished and protected instead by framing behind glass. Varnishing can alter the surface quality and is not standard practice for the medium.