The whole kit: six colors, two brushes, water
Okay. Supply talk. This is the boring-sounding lesson that saves you money and panic later, so bear with me.
Here's what you actually need:
- Six watercolor half-pans. Not the 48-color rainbow set. I know the big sets look like a better deal. They're not, not for you, not yet.
- Two brushes. One round, one flat.
- Water. Two containers — one for clean, one for rinsing. Tap water is fine. Yes, even our hard water. It hasn't ruined a single painting of mine and I've made a lot of bad ones.
- Paper. Cheap stuff. We'll talk paper weight in a second because it matters more than the paint does.
That's the whole kit. If someone at the store tries to upsell you a 48-pan set with a name-brand mascot on it, be polite and walk away.
Why six colors and not more
More colors sounds like more freedom. It's actually the opposite for a beginner. You stand in front of forty-eight little pans and your brain locks up trying to decide which one is "right" for the tree. With six, you don't have that problem. You mix. Mixing is the actual skill anyway — knowing that this blue plus a little of that yellow gets you the foothills-in-August color is worth more than owning a pan labeled "sage."
My six: a warm red, a cool red, a yellow, a blue, maybe a second blue if the set has one, and something brown or earthy. If your set's naming is different than that, don't stress, we'll sort it out in class. The exact names matter less than having a warm and a cool of each primary-ish color.
The paper opinion, stated as a fact, because it basically is one
Buy cheap paper first. I mean this. I spent forty dollars on nice artist-grade cold-press paper before I could paint anything worth putting on it, and then I was too scared to touch it for months because I didn't want to "waste" it. That's backwards. You want to waste paper right now. Waste a lot of it. Get a pad of student-grade watercolor paper, something cheap, and go through it like scratch paper.
Once you're comfortable, upgrade. Not before.
One real technical note: get actual watercolor paper, not printer paper, even the cheap watercolor stuff. Printer paper buckles into something like a potato chip the second water hits it. My very first wash ever did exactly that — I didn't know better, grabbed regular paper, and watched it warp into a shape that belonged in a bag of chips, not a frame. I taped my next piece down and it still buckled a little. Eventually I just decided buckled paper was part of my personality and moved on. You can skip that whole phase by spending the extra two dollars on paper made for this.
If the pad says "140lb" on it, that's good. That number is paper weight, and it's the difference between paper that shrugs off water and paper that turns into oatmeal.
Two brushes is genuinely enough
Round brush: this is your workhorse. Washes, details, filling in shapes, all of it.
Flat brush: good for skies, big open areas, straight-ish edges.
You do not need the 12-brush set either. Same logic as the paint. Too many tools, too much deciding, not enough painting.
Water: more important than people think
Two containers. One clean, one dirty. When your clean water starts looking like the dirty water, dump it and refill. This sounds obvious until you're forty minutes into a painting and everything's coming out the color of dishwater because you never changed the cup.
Quick and real caution here: don't drink out of the water cups. I say this because with kids around my house it's come up more than once, and if you're painting with grandkids or nieces and nephews, watch the cups. Watercolor pigment isn't something you want a toddler sipping.
The fridge, honestly
I want to tell you where the bar is set for "finished," because people get weird and perfectionist about this stuff before they've even opened the set.
I have never entered a painting in a show. Never framed one. Never sold one. The best thing that's happened to any painting of mine is that one of my sky washes got taped to the fridge with a magnet from a pizza place, and it's still there. That's the ceiling in my house. A magnet and some fridge real estate. If that's where your painting ends up too, you did it right.
So don't buy nice paper waiting to make something fridge-worthy. Buy the cheap stuff, make a mess, and let the good one surprise you.
Before next time: grab your six colors, two brushes, and a cheap pad of actual watercolor paper (140lb, student grade is fine) so we can get water on it together. Don't practice anything yet. Just get the stuff.