Welcome to Watercolor 101. I’ve listed below what we’ll need for the first lesson – we’ll be getting to know our paints and learning how to mix colors.

Materials needed :

• A 9×12 sheet of watercolor paper for the color mixes (doesn’t need to be the best quality)

• A size 10 round watercolor brush

• Mechanical pencil

• A palette (plastic is fine) to squeeze out paints and mix colors

• Tube paints :

  • Cadmium red (or an orangey red like vermillion or naphthol red)

  • A pinkish red such as permanent alizarin crimson or permanent rose.

  • Lemon yellow

  • Yellow ochre

  • Phthalo blue or cobalt blue

  • Ultramarine blue

  • Burnt sienna

  • Black

• A color isolator which is just a piece of grey card with a half inch hole cut in the middle. If you have a printer you can download the image below and print it. Failing that a hole in a piece of white paper will do.

I’ve included two digital color wheels below for reference. No need to print these but they’re useful to have handy on the screen for reference.

12 Step Color Wheel

24 Step Color Wheel

We’ll be using the following sets of color swatches to practice mixing. Again if you can print them please do but having them up on the screen should suffice too.

High Chroma Color Swatches

Medium Chroma Color Swatches

Low Chroma Color Swatches

Example Image 1 for Color Matching

Example Image 2 for Color Matching