Important stuff for choosing your watercolors

So, when you choose your future super cool and pretty watercolor palette you may wonder: WHY THE HELL ALL THIS STUFF MEANS?

And here's me today trying to explain base stuff about that! :D

1. So, the stars or * icon means lightfastness. More stars - more lightfast the paint is, that means your artwork can stay bright and saturated for longer time if you put it on your wall, for example, or at other place where the sun is pretty strong. If you paint your work for scanning or storing in a dark place, you don't have to worry about it. For example, I LOVE Opera color, but it has a very little lightfastness so I try to not use it for stuff I plan to put on my of someone's else wall, but sometimes it doesn't matter if the person really wants bright colors, you always can scan it to save the colors.

Artists grade paint doesn't guarantee you perfect lightfastness, like, you can see above the Shinhan PWC dot card photo and you can notice, that it have three, two or even one star being still srtists grade. So check this point before choosing your paint. 

2. The square, white, black or half filled (I wonder why Holbein doesn't put this on their tubes, but I tried to find in on a tube and can't oO they still post this info on their information block on the websites tho) mean transparency. Is this paint fully transparent they use white square, half way transparent - half filled one, have a pretty good coverage - black one. As I can tell you by my experience - more transparent paints are very light or bright paints, non-transparent - dark saturated colors or colors that contain PW6 (white) pigment in it, because it automatically makes everything non-transparent. (But it still doesn't mean that it's completely full covering like gouache, it still watercolors after all :DD)

The series usually means stuff inside the company and mostly are about the price of the paint. Like, series A or series 1 are the cheapest paint from the brand, series E or 4 can be two-three times more expensive. I think this is because if the pigments used, natural pigments series from Daniel Smith are VEEEEERYYYY expensive.

Also on the sites you can find the permanency information, it mostly means if you can completely wipe your paint from your paper (but I'm doubting it in terms on working on a cotton paper, since it absorbs any paint pretty quickly hahaha)

Also on the tube you can find information about pigments used to make this colors. Most colors are already a mix of two and even more pigments so I don't recommend you to mix it with other paint, it will make it look dirty because of pigments quantity used. Some colors have only one pigment inside that makes them perfect for mixing.

I hope I helped you a little with this post!