myriamtillson

My Paints - Studio Supplies #3

Added 2020-07-08 15:11:00 +0000 UTC

Hi everyone,

This post is the third in my "Studio Supplies" Series, where I detail all my favourite supplies for different stages of my creative process.

In this post, I will be talking about all the paints I currently favour and use the most.
This will include my watercolour, gouache, inks and acrylic paints.
I also own oils, but haven't used them enough to justify having them in this list (yet).

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- Here are all my "Process Posts" :

▶ My favourite drawing supplies : LINK
▶ My favourite brushes : LINK
▶ My favourite paints (this post)
▶ My studio and set-ups : soon
▶ How I transfer a sketch to the final paper : soon
▶ How I prepare my paper before painting : soon ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

✦ Watercolour

WatercoIour was the first medium I ever tried. When I was in school, we were encouraged to use acrylics, but I always preferred watercolours.
Nowadays, I use a wide variety of watercolour brands, that I have collected over the years.
I don't have a clear favourite, and will use various ones depending on the effect I want to achieve.
I use watercolour in pans, rather than fresh, although I do prefer buying tubes as they are most cost effective and last longer. I simply decant any fresh colours I have into a pan.
I created myself a watercolour tin that comprises all my colours so far, and includes a colour chart with the colour and brand name of each pan.
Each pan has a magnetic sheet glued to its bottom so that it stays in place in the tin.

⇫ The brands in this tin are :
- Winsor&Newton, A&N Pro, W&N Artist
- Qor (fantastic colours)
- White Night
- Daniel Smith (probably one of my favourite brands, thank you Virginia for sending me my first!)
- Holbein
- Mission and Mission Gold
- Sennelier
- Da Vinci
- Brehat

⇫ These colours' lightfastness is questionable, so I tend to mostly use this set in my sketchbook. I also have a bigger set with more colours.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━✦ Gouache

- Normal Gouache (reactivatable)

Gouache is another one of my favourite mediums, and I now have quite a few different brands.
My favourites are probably Winsor&Newton and M.Graham Co. but I also have a bunch of Daler Rowney Aquafine, which are great, especially on a budget, as well as some Daler Rowney Designers, Linel, Pebeo, and Da Vinci (Thanks Virginia).

[I am still in the process of photographing and labelling them, will have them up soon]

I also have a few pots of Alpha Poster Colour, which are cheaper than regular gouache, and I suspect less lightfast, so I use them mostly in my sketchbook.

- Acrylic Gouache (not-reactivatable)

I don't use my Acrylic Gouache very often, as I don't enjoy it as much as my other mediums, but I do whip it out on occasion when I feel it will work best for some specific elements or details.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━✦ Acrylic

Acrylic paint is my new favourite medium to experiment with. I particularly enjoy using them to paint my bigger pieces, as these usually require more layers, and I tend to overwork my surface more easily if I use gouache or watercolour.

To start off, I bought myself a set of Fluid Body acrylic, as well as an extra large pot of medium body titanium white, and a medium to heavy body tube of Payne's grey.
I also splurged on a set of "Muted Colours", as I got reeled in by Christmas ads last year, haha.
I LOVE my fluid body acrylics. I can use them in washes in a similar way I would watercolours, and I have taken to them very easily.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ✦ Inks

I don't use inks extensively in paintings, and I tend to take them out mostly when I'm sketching or for Inktober, but I think they deserve to be mentioned on this list anyway.
I have a variety of acrylic inks, but I hardly ever use them, so I'll add them if I one day start using them more, but for now here are the inks I use regularly.

I have a few dedicated brushes that I only use with these inks, as they never really wash off enough that I would trust using the brush for something else.