Christmas 2017 Gifts For Watercolourists

Buying for an artist isn't always easy, and with Christmas 2017 coming up and every shop in the market selling things at amazing discounts, I wanted to pull together some ideas for gifts for watercolour painters - most are items I have reviewed in the past 12 months but others are "old faithful" high quality products. Rather than day-to-day supplies like general paper blocks etc, I've focussed on things someone may not own or even consider so they can get a bit of a surprise with their gifts!

Jackson's Artist Watercolours - Set of 12 full pans
(£47.70 or EUR54.21 or US$63.78)
I've reviewed this set recently and absolutely love it. Normally priced at £53, it is current discounted. You can watch my review of it here.
[not suitable for vegans]

Daniel Smith PrimaTek Watercolours - Set of 6 tubes
(£31.50 or EUR34.66 or US$40.78)
This is a set of 6 paints formulated from finely ground natural minerals - Rhodonite, Amethyst, Jadeite, Piemontite, Hematite and Mayan Blue (a mix of copal, indigo and clay). They're a lot of fun and quite different to most watercolours as they have extreme granulation, for example. The set normally sells for £40.90. You can watch my review of the Primatek colours here.
[not suitable for vegans]

Golden Qor Watercolours - Introductory Set of 12 tubes
(£43.20 or EUR49.09 or US$57.76)
The Qor watercolours from Golden are unusual in that they use an artificial binder in lieu of gum arabic, and have very strong flow. They are particularly popular at the moment, and as well as open stock, a number of sets are available, of which this is probably the most useful as a gift. With an RRP of almost £59.96, this is an excellent price point! You can watch my review of the 24-set that contains all of the colours in this set here.

Kuretake Gansai Tambi Japanese Watercolours Set of 12 large pans
(£15.48 or EUR17.60 or US$20.69)
These Eastern watercolours (stickier and more opaque than Western ones - very good on rice paper and for sumi-e) are very popular with card makers and this set of 12 very large pans is a good way to try them out. With an RRP of £20.06.
[not suitable for vegans]

Lutea Extra Fine Watercolours - Individual 9mL Tubes
The Lutea brand are entirely made from flower pigments and are exceptionally beautiful and may be a nice, unusual gift for an experienced watercolourist. The colours that may make the best gifts are as follows as they would make a nice primary triad, plus an unusual deep violet as a bonus feature. All are rated 5-6 on the blue wool scale (1-8, 8 being best) for lightfastness, which is around 3 on the I-IV scale many manufacturers use.
Violet (Logwood, NBk3 and NBk4) £19.50 or EUR22.16 or US$26.06
Red (Madder, NR9) £17.10 or EUR19.45 or US$22.86
Blue (Indigo, NB1) £21.50 or EUR24.44 or US$28.74
Yellow (Goldenrod, N/A) £21.50 or EUR24.44 or US$28.74
[not suitable for vegans]

Schmincke Horadam - Set of 12 half pans
(£58.00 or EUR65.93 or US$77.52)
These are beautiful fine-quality paints from Germany and are amongst the best watercolours in the world. This little palette contains Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Light, Permanent Carmine, Cadmium Red Light, Prussian Blue, Finest Ultramarine, Phthalo Green, Permanent Green Olive, Yellow Ochre, English Venetian Red, Sepia Brown and Ivory Black, along with a little travel brush and a swatch card. They have very high pigment loads and are actually good value - they have an RRP of £68.35. You can watch my review of this little palette here.
[not suitable for vegans]

Nevskaya Palitra White Nights - Set of 12 full pans
(£15.60 or EUR17.70 or US$20.80)
White Nights paints are of very fine quality and are perfect for beginners and experienced painters as they are artist-quality but very economical. They are comparable in flow, colour and fine quality to Schmincke in many ways but they are far more economical. This set of 12 full pans has an RRP of £25.95. You can watch my review of some White Nights colours here.
[not suitable for vegans]

Jackson's Kolinsky watercolour brushes - set of 3
(£15.50 or EUR17.68 or US$20.78)
Really best suited to the more advanced painter, or the novice who is wanting to move upwards. Kolinsky is the non plus ultra of natural fibre watercolour brushes, and this set from Jackson's is nicely presented in modern, classy packaging and comprises the following range of sizes which are particularly useful for those painting fine detail such as in botanical paintings:
Round Size 1
Round Size 5
Round Size 7
[not suitable for vegans]

Jackson's Icon sable-synthetic watercolour brushes - set of 3
(£16.50 or EUR18.82 or US$22.12)
Suitable for beginners or advanced painters alike. These brushes blend sable with a pored-synthetic that gives the brushes snap and strength so they're not as delicate/fragile as pure kolinsky or sable can be, so they are better suited to beginners who haven't quite got to grips with brushwork yet. This is a lovely versatile set, with a good sized quill (pointed mop) for washes and loose work, a round for precision and a lovely flat that is SO good for glazing! You can watch my review of this set here.
Round Size 8
Quill Size 2 (aka Pointed Wash)
Flat 1/2" 
[not suitable for vegans]

Jackson's Speciality badger/squirrel watercolour brushes - set of 3
(£16.80 or EUR19.17 or US$22.54)
These brushes might be nice for a very experienced painter as they're the kinds of morphologies that you can get away without but once you have them, they make such a difference! They are specifically designed for painting foliage and in landscape painting but they're also useful for seascapes and in abstract work. The fan and comb are both made from badger hair, which is very stiff and excellent for making tight little marks when used vertically. The dagger is made of squirrel hair, which will paint lovely long lines and hold a long of paint - it's a sign-writing brush sensu stricto, and it's super-useful for painting fences, blades of grass and anything you'd normally use a rigger for - this is even sharper:
Stippler Fan, Medium
Foliage Comb, 1/2"
Dagger, 3/8"
[not suitable for vegans]

Jackson's Raven watercolour quill (pointed mop) - VEGAN FRIENDLY!
(£17.20 or EUR19.58 or US$23.01)
This is a totally vegan brush - the fibre is a synthetic designed to mimic squirrel hair so it will hold a lot of water - it's also a WHOPPING brush at 1.6cm in diameter, and, being a quill (pointed mop), there is no glue, oh, and the 'quill' is plastic. It's a lovely huge brush and would help loosening up and painting in a more expressive style, and is suitable for all levels of painter.
It comes in many sizes, but I'm recommending as a gift:
Quill, Size 6

Saunders Waterford Cold Press 7.5" by 11.0" 25 sheet spiral pad of 140lb
(£17.40 or EUR19.80 or US$23.28)
Saunders Waterford is a beautiful 100% cotton paper that the Royal Watercolour Society has approved. It is internally sized with gelatine and surface sized, so your colours will look vibrant and washes will stay wet for longer. It's a robust paper that you can scrub on with lifting brushes without causing any damage. I've reviewed this paper previously and shown what it's capable of and I recommend this as my personal favourite paper. I personally use the Rough finish in the 300lb weight, but I think the Cold Press finish is better for most artists as Rough isn't for everyone, so that's what I've picked out in this useful spiral bound book that could be used as a journal or for working on paintings all on one specific theme. Perfect for advanced painters as well as novices that have already moved onto cotton papers - I'd not suggest this for someone not yet used to cotton in the context of being a good gift. 

Product Review: Jackson's Artist Watercolour full pans and tubes

STOP PRESS! I should add that Jackson's could well have a Black Friday sale of some kind this very week - well, I'm assuming so, since most companies seem to have one, anyway, so I've front loaded this post with all of the procurement info so that you don't need to dig! These paints would make an amazing Christmas gift so don't forget to shop whilst the Black Friday sales are still on! You can buy the palette with 12 full-pans (£45.05) and/or pick up individual pans to use alone or with the palette. I do recommend adding a full pan of Phthalocyanine Blue as a better cool blue that the more mid-tone Cobalt Blue, and if you're anything like me, you'll want to get a Burnt Sienna whilst you're at it!

If you want to give this set to someone under 16 or so, or who is pregnant or breastfeeding, or you're just not confident painting with heavy-metal containing paints and want some options, I would recommend you just buy 3 extra paints as non-toxic alternatives:

Swap Cadmium Yellow Light for Jackson's Yellow Light (£2.81 - PY154 Benzimidazolone Yellow 154)
Swap Cadmium Red Light for Bright Red (£2.98 - PR254 Pyrrole Red and PO43 Perinone Orange)
Swap Cobalt Blue for Phthalocyanine Blue (£2.81 - PB15 Phthalocyanine Blue)

See the end of this post for sundries like Ox Gall pans you can add to your palette to give you stronger flow exactly where and when you need it!

This is an amazing set, but if you want to make it even better, you can add a few colours for not much money at all. In the video, I suggested some extra colours you might want to add - there is space for 2 more, but you can probably remove the black and fit 3 full pans or 6 half pans (you would have to pour the latter from tubes) in, and I would suggest adding:

Burnt Sienna Pan £2.81 Tube £4.85 (PBk7 Brown Iron Oxide)
Phthalocyanine Blue Pan £2.81  Tube £4.85 (PB15 Phthalocyanine Blue)
Cobalt Violet Deep Hue Pan £2.98 Tube £5.53  (PR122 Quinacridone Red PV16 Manganese Violet)

---

It's not very often that I'm genuinely bowled over by the quality of a product, but today is one of those days! A few weeks back I contacted Jackson's in the UK to see if they would let me review their Artist Watercolours. I explained that I really like to review a Cool Red, Warm Red, Cool Yellow, Warm Yellow, Cool Blue, Warm Blue, Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna, as those 8 colours are what I think all beginners should start out with, and I like to be able to recommend paints to beginners, of course.

Julie at Jackson's very kindly sent me one of their 12-full-pan palettes, and she noted it had a Venetian Red instead of my preferred Burnt Sienna, so she also sent me a 21mL tube of Burnt Sienna so I could see the colour and try out their tube paints at the same time - great plan. I have also been sent 3 types of brush but they will follow in later videos.

The palette contains full pans of:
Lemon Yellow (PY3 Hansa Yellow 10G)
Cadmium Yellow Light (PY35 Cadmium zinc sulfide)
Carmine (PV19 Quinacridone Violet)
Cadmium Red Light (PR108 Cadmium selenosulfide)
Cobalt Blue (PB28 Cobalt aluminium blue spinel)
French Ultramarine (PB29 Ultramarine Blue)
Phthalo Green Deep (PG7 Phthalocyanine Green BS + PB15 Phthalocyanine Blue)
Permanent Sap Green (PB29 Ultramarine Blue + PY153 Nickel Dioxime Yellow)
Yellow Ochre (PY43 Yellow Iron Oxide [Natural])
Venetian Red (PR101 Red Iron Oxide [Synthetic] + PY43 Yellow Iron Oxide [Natural])
Burnt Umber (PBr7 Brown Iron Oxide)
Ivory Black (PBk9 Bone Black)

And they also gave me a 21-mL tube of:
Burnt Sienna (PBr7 Brown Iron Oxide)

The price point for the palette set of 12 full-pans complete with a really high-quality metal palette (with mixing surfaces that don't make your paint bead up too much!) AND a tree planted in the Highlands of Scotland by Trees For Life is £53.00 [US$70.61] but they have been reduced to £45.05 [US$60.00] recently. Now given those palettes are £12 or so on Amazon UK, you're looking at a price per full-pan of somewhere around £3.40 [US$4.53] at full price or £2.75 [US$3.66] at the discounted price - pretty hard to beat for a professional watercolour, right?! Not many companies make a charitable donation on a purchase, and I really admire Jackson's for taking the lead with that.

Most "own brand" paints are not that great - very generic, very chalky or gloopy and not fun at all. Jackson's Artist Watercolours are the polar opposite - to look at, they resemble the extruded pans of Winsor and Newton, but in use they lift as easily from the pan as Schmincke and have very similar levels of flow as Schmincke Horadam and Daniel Smith - you can see for yourself in my YouTube review video, where I go into a lot of detail about them.

If you're interested in the adjunct products I used in this video, they are:

Daler and Rowney The Langton Watercolour Paper 140lb Rough Spiral Bound Pad. [Jackson's: £7.60] This is a good quality chemical pulp paper - I use it for videos and for warm-ups and sketches - it's well made and a good option particularly for beginners who want to experience a professional paper. If you prefer a cotton paper, Daler and Rowney sell that too, and it really is a very nice paper and quite economical.
Daler and Rowney The Langton Prestige Watercolour Paper 140lb Rough Spiral Bound Pad. [Jackson's: £9.60]

ProArte 12 Round Prolene Plus Watercolour Brush [Jackson's: £8.16] Prolene Plus is my favourite synthetic brush fibre that I have found. It is based on Prolene, a form of polypropylene used worldwide as a surgical suturing thread, with a mix of different fibre thicknesses and so on to make these brushes superior to the standard Prolene line also by ProArte - they are very economical and I could not recommend them more strongly if you want a good synthetic brush. They're also very pretty, which is never a bad thing, right?! You can view the full range here.

Winsor and Newton Ox Gall 75mL [Jackson's: £5.60] I used Daler and Rowney in the video but to be honest, I prefer the W&N one for both quality and price. Ox gall is a combination of bile salts from cattle bile obtained from abattoir waste - deoxycholate and so on - and they act as a surfactant to reduce the surface tension and promote better wetting of the pigment grains - just like soap would do when washing the dishes really. If you paint on some high-end papers such as Arches by Canson or Millford by St Cuthbert's Mill that have really very hard sizing, a touch of ox gall in your water can help to wet the paper without the water beading up - of all watercolour mediums, this and Gum Arabic (below) are the most useful. Ox gall is usually sold as a solution in a bottle which can be a bit inconvenient, but if you would prefer a solid ox gall that you can keep in your palette, you can also get that - I use it en plein air a lot and these Schmincke pans of it last AGES and smell of lavender, which is nice! 
Half-Pan Schmincke Onetz [Jackson's: £3.20]
Full-Pan Schmincke Onetz [Jackson's: £4.80]
If you would prefer a vegan alternative, there is one sold under the Qor brand by Golden [Jackson's: £9.60], which is particularly popular.

Winsor and Newton Gum Arabic 75mL [Jackson's: £5.60] This is really useful for making washes smoother and it makes the colours seem more vibrant. It's the vehicle used in most paint brands - some use Gum Senegal (aka Senegalese Gum Arabic or Kordofan Gum Arabic) instead, and Qor by Golden uses Aquazol, which I've explained previously. If you think about oil painting, adding extra linseed oil (the vehicle of oil paints) into your paints gives you longer drying times, more time to work the paint, a glossy finish and a more vibrant, transparent colour - Gum Arabic added to watercolours does exactly the same thing, and I found it worked beautifully with these watercolours by Jackson's - both the pans and the tubes.

Product Review: Nevskaya Palitra's "White Nights" watercolours - full pans

I seem to be totally behind the rest of the world re: the White Nights line from Nevskaya Palitra ("the Neva palette", named for the Neva River which flows through St Petersburg, where they are based). A lot of you already love their paints and I've seen a lot of folk use them but I'd kind of never really thought they'd be very good quality. BOY WAS I WRONG! A little while ago, I saw that Jackson's in the UK sold them SUPERCHEAP and that tempted me to try them. 

Let me just give you a bit of an idea of how very economical they are:
For comparison - here are the RRPs of some major brands in full-pans of professional quality paint based on PR122 Quinacridone Red or PV19 Quinacridone Violet - both are similar in cost as raw pigments. Those indicated with "*" don't sell full pans, so I've doubled the price of a half-pan to give an approximation.

Winsor and Newton - Quinacridone Magenta [PR122] £9.25 [US$12.24]
Jackson's - Quinacridone Purple [PR122] £4.00 [US$5.29]
*Maimeriblu - Rose Lake [PV19] £16.54 [US$21.90]
*Old Holland - Magenta [PR122] £18.22 [US$24.12]
*Rembrandt - Quinacridone Rose [PV19] £12.10 [US$16.02]
Schmincke - Ruby Red [PV19] £9.79 [US$12.96]
Wallace-Seymour - Quinacridone Magenta [PV19] £7.55 [US$10.00]
White Nights - Quinacridone Rose [PR122] £2.55 [US$ 3.38]

See? Economical huh? Well, it gets better - Jackson's retail White Nights fullpans starting at just £1.70 [US$2.25] which is amazing value. I was fully prepared for something really chalky and low quality but to be honest, I was amazed. The quality is a lot like Schmincke but with a slightly more sticky texture in the pans, like Wallace-Seymour, as they are made with honey. Most of the White Nights line are single-pigment colours, and they are made with honey and Gum Arabic, just like the more expensive brands.

When selecting my colours, I went for a cool triad that was actually so cool it was technically in the CMY universe, which means beautiful bright and vivid mixes but a narrow gamut - this will make for challenges of the fun kind later. I also picked 2 random colours:

Lemon (PY3 Hansa Yellow G)
Rose (PR81 Rhodamine 6G)
Bright Blue (PB15:3 Phthalocyanine Blue BGS)
Blue Lake (PB1 Victoria Blue)
Voronezhskaya Black (PBk8 Vine Black)

I love them all very much and you can see my experiences over on my YouTube channel:

If you want to buy these paints, I highly recommend Jackson's as they have international shipping and the very low prices will probably mean the shipping breaks even.

Product Review: Holbein Artists' Watercolour

The HK Holbein Watercolours brand are made in Osaka, Japan, and boast a number of special properties. I noticed in the Jackson's Art Supplies in the UK had listed them as higher quality than Daniel Smith or Winsor and Newton in their 2017 Watercolour Catalogue, so I was intrigued! I procured a Starter Set (aka Introductory Set), which contains Vermillion Hue, Carmine Lake, Viridian Hue, Permanent Yellow Deep, Burnt Sienna and Peacock Blue. I reviewed them in my recent video which you can watch here:

If you want to buy Holbein watercolours to try them for yourself, you can try the following vendors - personally, I think Jackson's have the best deals and shipping prices and they have a better range of stock as a rule:

Jackson's Art Supplies
UK based company with fantastic customer service and have international shipping options and a LOT of excellent discounts!

Amazon UK
They have a good selection and some good deals but if you want individual colours, Jackson's is probably better.

Amazon USA
Again, much like the UK site but a good selection of individual colours.

If you want the specific set that I tried out to see for yourself:

Rubbing alcohols plural - what are the differences and what's the alternative?

This post came from a conversation I had with Wendy Vecchi this morning on Twitter, where the usual "is surgical spirit just the UK name for rubbing alcohol?" thing came up. I thought I'd explain why this is wrong and what the key differences are and what you can use instead.

SAFETY: all alcohols mentioned herein are flammable and you should exercise care when using them. Some can cause lightheadedness when inhaled so I recommend you work with the windows open!

People often use rubbing alcohol in techniques like adding it to watercolour or oil-based inks to produce new effects, but in the UK, it isn't really sold widely. Many people do assume "rubbing alcohol" to just be the US name for "surgical spirit" - and in terms of their medical uses, they are analogous - but they don't have similar compositions and whilst surgical spirit may work to some extent in your work, it may also have undesired effects. Herein I've written out their different properties and explained why they do/don't do what they do - some of it is quite technical but I've tried to use "normal" English and laymanise everything! If you're not interested in the whys and wherefores - please scroll down and just read the "bottom line" bit and ignore the details!

Rubbing alcohol is a US product and was originally used to rub onto muscles and had various oils added. It's not mostly used in medicine as an antiseptic or to dissolve certain things like when removing adhesives from the skin. It comes in two key varieties in the USA - one is based on ethanol (aka ethyl alcohol or grape alcohol - the same type of alcohol found in all alcoholic drinks) at either 70% (v/v) or 90% (v/v) concentration i.e. 70mL ethanol and 30mL water or 90mL ethanol and 10mL water. The second type is based on iso-propanol (aka iso-propyl alcohol, 2-propanol, propan-2-ol - this type of alcohol is NOT found in any beverages) - this also comes at 70% 70% (v/v) or 90% (v/v). ALL types of rubbing alcohol are denatured by the addition of denatonium compounds (e.g. denatonium acetate aka BITTERANT-A, or denatonium benzoate aka BITTERANT-B or Bitrex, or denatonium saccharide aka BITTERANT-S), which are painfully bitter and make it near impossible to consume, along with the other common bittering denaturant sucrose octacetate.

Surgical spirit is a UK product and is much more like the original 1920s version of rubbing alcohol and it is still used for thickening the skin of the feet (hikers), hands (rowers) or back (bed-bound patients). It has variable compositions but is most commonly in 2017 based on ethanol, but it has various oils added to quite high concentrations - 5-10% of the total volume will be a mix of castor oil, oil of wintergreen (aka methyl salicylate) and solvents like diethyl phthalate that help to keep the oils in solution. The ethanol used is in the form of industrial methylated spirit (IMS or white meths or industrial alcohol), which is about 90-95% (v/v) ethanol with the remaining 5-10% comprised of methanol (aka wood alcohol, methyl alcohol, hence "methylated" spirit), which is a deadly poison and 1) makes it harder to drink and 2) is very hard to separate from the ethanol by freezing or distilling so prevents people trying to purify it. Industrial methylated spirit should not be confused with methylated spirit (aka meths, pink meths) which contains a dye (purple in the UK, green-yellow in some countries), pyridine (foul smelling, to make it even harder to drink - this is the stuff that gives meths its characteristic smell) and compounds like Bitrex etc.

So how do they compare side-by-side? Let's compare - I've ignored the 70% rubbing alcohols as they're not much good for arts and crafts other than for cleaning up inks and paints!

Comparison of rubbing alcohols (USA) and surgical spirit (UK). All values are % v/v. KEY: EtOH = ethanol; iso-PrOH = iso-propanol; MeOH = methanol; oils = any oils/water-insoluble solvents. Bittering agents are omitted since they are present at ≤1% (w/v).

Product	EtOH	Oils	Water	MeOH	iso-PrOH
Rubbing alcohol (90% ethanol)	90	0	10	0	0
Rubbing alcohol (90% iso-propanol)	0	0	10	0	90
Surgical spirit	85.5	5	0	9.5	0

So where does that leave us? First of all, surgical spirit is 1/20th (5% v/v) oils - that means you will get residues left on your work, and it will smell of oil of wintergreen for some time, which is not unpleasant to be honest! Castor oil is not a "drying oil" like the oils used in oil paintings, it won't harden over time and will remain greasy, but it may smell rancid over time. Not what you want! Should we be worried about methanol toxicity? In the above table, I used 90:10 ethanol:methanol in the IMS component of the surgical spirit, but if it was a 95:5 one used, the methanol would be down to 4.75% (v/v) - it may even be less than that - there are 99:1 mixes out there but I don't know which is used in the bottle of surgical spirit that I keep in my bathroom medicine cabinet! So no, in short, given that the amount is little AND surgical spirit is designed to be rubbed into the skin, I would not be concerned about it overly. 

How do ethanol and iso-propanol based rubbing alcohols compare? Can they be used in the same techniques?
Here's a comparison of the chemical and physical properties of the two alcohols which will help us understand a bit more about what they can and can't do - don't panic about unfamiliar words or symbols - I'm going to explain them and you DON'T need to remember or refer to this table ever again - I've only put it here so you can more easily see "this one has a bigger value than that one" or "this one is 10 times higher than that one" and get a feel for how different they are.

Comparison of properties of ethanol and iso-propanol at 20 °C unless otherwise stated. I have also added water, as a reference point

Property	Ethanol	iso-Propanol	Water
No. C atoms	2	3	0
No. H-bond donors	1	1	2
Melting point (°C)	-114	-89	0
Boiling point (°C)	+78	+ 83	+ 100
Density (g/ML)	0.789	0.786	0.998
Viscosity (mPa.s)	1.20	2.34	1.00
Water solubility	Miscible	Miscible	Miscible
Vapour pressure (kPa)	5.95	4.40	2.30
Acidity, pKa (in water)	15.9	16.5	14.0
Partition coefficient	0.66	1.12	0.05
Surface tension (mN/m)	22.4	21.4	72.9
Solubility of table salt (g/L)	0.03	0.65	359

There are only a few key properties that matter to us as artists and crafters and I'll explain them - firstly let's think about a typical use of alcohols in crafting. You've painted some watercolour and whilst it's still wet, you drip onto it a form of rubbing alcohol so that you can make interesting 'bubble' shapes in the paint. When the alcohol lands, it pushes away the water before dissolving in it, then evaporating, which gives you that characteristic pattern. Let's work backwards - evaporation - drying the paper after use. Whilst water has the highest boiling point (the point liquid turns into gas) of the three, ethanol evaporates faster at room temperature owing to the vapour pressure being the highest. The higher the vapour pressure, the more a liquid wants to be a gas, so the faster it will evaporate - you can see that iso-propanol will dry slower off of the page than ethanol but still faster than water. 

When those droplets of alcohol land on your page, the viscosity and surface tension dictate how they will behave versus the water on the page. Both are more viscous (less runny) than water but iso-propanol is considerably less runny than ethanol - so when dropped onto a wet page, it will move more slowly across it. The surface tension can tell us how well a drop will behave. If you think about dropping water onto your non-stick craft sheet, you will get nice domed droplets as water has a very high surface tension, but if you do the same with alcohols, they will run around and form a flat layer as their surface tension is so very much lower - the two alcohols are similar in this regard. When it comes to adding alcohols to water-based media, density (how heavy the liquid is based on how much 1mL weighs) is important. Water has a density of close to 1g per 1mL but alcohols are lower - so they will want to float on the water - think about what happens if you add alcohol inks to paper wetted with water, for example.

Solubility is important too - look at how much table salt dissolves in each solvent. Water is excellent for dissolving what we call ionic compounds - thinks with charges that split in water and disperse really well - but what water can't do is dissolve greasy molecules. Think back to the surgical spirit with castor oil in it - you can dissolve oils (and thus oil-based inks like Ranger Archival) in alcohols really easily but they don't dissolve in water - this is the basis of many cool techniques. If you want to try these, iso-propanol is generally better as those greasy molecules like water-insoluble dyes generally prefer dissolving in it than in ethanol so you'll be able to get better results. The partition coefficient is a related measure - this is a measure of if you give a chemical a choice of dissolving in water or in a greasy alcohol (octan-1-ol), will it pick the water (lower numbers) or the greasy solvent (higher numbers) - you can see from the table that iso-propanol likes all things greasy and keep this in mind - oil pastels, oil paints, gel pastels, crayons - anything waxy or greasy can get swollen, dissolved or lifted by iso-propanol but far less so by ethanol and not at all by water - this CAN be a huge benefit but it can also be a nightmare when a few drops ruin your work.

The bottom line - which is best for what?
Use ethanol when you want fast-drying and you want your alcohol to travel pretty far on wet paper leaving you bigger 'bubbles'.
Use iso-propanol when drying time doesn't matter so much and when you want denser, smaller 'bubbles' in watercolour. This alcohol is better for dissolving oil-based dye inks like Ranger Archival - whilst ethanol will work, you may need to use more of it to get the dye to dissolve fully.

But I live in the UK - what can I use instead of surgical spirit?
You can use Ranger's Alcohol Blending Solution (which contains a mix of ethanol and iso-propanol with some other solvents to thicken it up a little bit so that it evaporates a bit more slowly) - but this is quite costly at around £5 per 100mL (£50 per litre!), so if you need a lot, you can buy various cheap 70-99% (v/v) iso-propanol solutions on UK Amazon - but you won't see them in shops very often. If you buy the 99.0% version or the 99.9% version, you need to dilute them for use as follows:

To make 90% from 99.0 or 99.9%, just mix 9 parts with 1 part water - store away from children in a clearly labelled jar and store away from heat or naked flames. If you want 70% too so that you can use it for cleaning brushes, it's just 7 parts of the 99.0% with 3 parts water.

Hope that this helps - you can use the store below to pick up any items you may need! 

QoR Watercolours by Golden - 24-colour set

I've recently obtained the 24-colour set of 5-mL QoR watercolour tube paints by Golden. Golden sells a number of paints and mediums under the QoR branding and they sell a number of sets - to be honest, I'm not convinced by some of the sets - who wants a "high chroma set" that doesn't have a proper blue? At least sell warm and cool triads, for example. You can also buy the loose paints, but they're not cheap. This 24-colour set cost me about US$80.00, which is about £60.00 or so - that's not THAT bad at £2.50 per tube, I guess, but I'm aware buying them as open stock or buying them in a lot of European countries is VERY costly. The 6-tube sets on Amazon UK sell for an equivalent of over £4 (US$5.20) per tube, which is a LOT. I got this set from Amazon USA where the price was more economical - I've not seen the 24-set for sale in the UK but on the basis of the 6-sets, I would estimate a sale price in the UK of somewhere near to £100 (US$130) for the set. You can get them fairly economically from Jackson's Art Supplies though:



Golden formulated QoR with a different binder to all other watercolours on the market. The conventional binders in most watercolours are usually gum arabic (from Vachellia seyal Delile (P.J.Hunter)) or gum senegal (from Acacia senegal L. (Willd.)). Gum arabic and gum senegal are both mostly composed of arabinogalactan, a gum polymer made up long chains that alternate between the pentose sugar arabinose and the hexose sugar galactose - so a bit like starch or glycogen, but they're both made up of the hexose sugar glucose. QoR watercolours use the binder Aquazol®, which is entirely synthetic.

Aquazols® (plural) are a range of polymers owned by Polymer Chemistry Innovations Inc. (PIC Inc.), which license the use of Aquazol® in watercolour to Golden. Instead of a mix of two sugars as the monomers of the polymer, Aquazols® use a single monomer - a derivative of the heterocycle 2-oxazoline, which is a 5-membered ring containing 3 carbons, an oxygen and a nitrogen. 2-ethyl-2-oxazoline (2E2O) is the monomer, so it has an ethyl group attached to the carbon in between the N and the O. On its own, 2E2O is a liquid at room temperature and boils at over 125° C (over 250° F or almost 400 K), where as the polymerised form is very different. Firstly, Aquazol® doesn't quite exist - it's a product family. The long chains of 2E2O molecules joined together aren't always the same length, so PIC Inc. separates the mixes into different average sizes and sells them under different names - e.g. Aquazol® 5 has a mean size of 5 kDa (kilodaltons, one Dalton is the atomic mass unit, the atomic mass of carbon-12 being 12 Da), Aquazol® 50, Aquazol® 200 and Aquazol® 500 are also sold, with mean masses of 50 kDa, 200 kDa and 500 kDa. Aquazols® are solid at room temperature and dissolve in water, making clear solutions, and this is why Golden promotes them as being "better" than gum arabic and gum senegal because those polymers are slightly yellow and thus slightly mask some pigments - specifically purples can in theory look slightly duller owing to neutralisation of the colour BUT in practice, I'm not convinced it's really an issue given how microspically thin the layer of polymer is over the pigments when painting watercolour! Aquazols® mostly find their uses for adhering metal gilt and for use as general adhesives in fine art restoration as they don't produce acid over time - and have been used this way for well over 10 years - long before Golden got hold of them.

Whilst I've not yet done a side-by-side road test for this, I have done a "first look" video of the QoR watercolours and swatched out this set:

Beginning my Daniel Smith watercolour exploration

I've started working my way through the Daniel Smith watercolours from the 238-colour spotcard that I have, after which I will also do the newer colours that are not found in that card. I have decided to cut these reviews down into the following series - you can see the first video over on YouTube already.

Standard Watercolours
I'm working through the basic colours from yellow through red, purple, blue, turquoise, green, neutrals, blacks and whites. I will break these down into a series of videos each covering about 24-36 colours.

PrimaTek Watercolours
These are the paints made from powdered minerals and which have exceptional texture and interesting granulation and depth. I have separated these out of the main series into their own videos, of which these will be 3-4 in total.

Mars Watercolours
These are granulating colours to which, effectively, black has been added or the pigments are ground course. I felt they would be more useful to my audience if separated out, so I will tackle them on their own.

Duochrome Watercolours
Each DuoChrome paint flips between two distinct, separate colours, for example, DuoChrome Saguaro can appear green-gold or copper. I will tackle all of these in one video.

Interference Watercolours
These are wonderful to have in watercolour! Usually we only get interference media in acrylic paints. They only really show up on dark backgrounds and change hue as you change position relative  to them. I will tackle all of these in one video.

Iridescent Watercolours
These paints reflect light and sparkle and shimmer like an opal. I will tackle all of them in one video.

A mini-haul and a surprise gift!

So, whilst it is lovely when my fans send me even just complementary emails let alone anything else, I've never asked for anything and never would, but I've had a series of really nice things sent to me in the last 6 months - mostly items people are keen for me to review - and I've been left a few tips in the tip jar on my website, which all helps to keep and improve my channel of course. I did get a surprise gift this week - a set of Royal and Langnickel scrubbing brushes for removing watercolour - I've no idea  who sent them as very often vendors don't pass that information to the recipient and I would like to be able to say thank you, so if it was you, please let me know! I gave them a really quick try out in this video but will do a proper review in due course. They certainly did the job lifting some Daniel Smith Moonglow that was long-dried onto a cheap scrap of paper, with far less effort that my usual scrubbing  tool (a sawn-off £2 hog bristle flat!) in any case!

This little haul is a couple of items I ordered from Amazon USA a few weeks back, namely:

Daniel Smith Watercolour Ground (Titanium White)
Amazon USA: US$10.92
Amazon Canada: CDN$38.32 CDN$30.84
Amazon UK: £29.68
Dick Blick: US$13.94 US$7.95
Jackson's: £9.99 £8.60

Prima Marketing The Classics Watercolours
Amazon USA: US$25.00 US$17.98
Amazon Canada: CDN$32.65
Amazon UK: £48.60 £17.56

How much does size really matter?

No, I don't mean men's willies, I mean size as in sizing on/in watercolour paper!

When paper is manufactured, sizing is added to reduce how much water the paper will absorb. Unsized papers are basically kitchen paper and so on - very absorbent and of course useless for art. Drawing papers are slightly sized ("slack sized") and have a bit of resistance to water, but watercolour papers are much more "hard sized" to make them very resistant. Now, within watercolour papers, we often refer to some as "hard sized" to mean "very hard sized" whereas the weaker sized watercolour papers are still "hard sized" in the context of all types of paper.

When paper is being put together, sizing can be added to the pulp, which results in "internal sizing", or, onto the surface ("surface sizing" - the latter is the much more water repellent form of paper.

In this video, I compared the following - the manufacturers are indicated as follows:
[DR] = Daler and Rowney
[SCM] = St Cuthbert's Mill
[C] = Canson
Chemical Pulp:
Aquafine Hot Press. This is a fairly low-end student-grade paper, which I only use for swatching normally [DR].
Optima This is not a watercolour paper - it's a mixed-media paper that I just added for a bit of a laugh really to see how it performed [DR].
Bockingford Cold Press. This is a very good paper that I use day-to-day [SCM].
Langton Rough. This is again, a decent day-to-day paper [DR].

Cotton Rag:
Langton Prestige Rough. This is a generally good paper that is a very good entry-level-to-cotton-papers paper, for people who are moving up from chemical pulp papers [DR].
Saunders Waterford Cold Press. This is pretty hard-sized and a very high quality paper [SCM].
Arches Cold Press. This is quite hard-sized but ultimately no more so than Saunders Waterford [C].
Millford Cold Press. This is almost an "extreme sized" paper, with a very strong surface sizing. There is nothing else like this  on the market [SCM].

I did my tests using French Ultramarine by Winsor & Newton in one of their large pans - these are VERY economical and well worth having for the colours you use the most:

Amazon USA No stock at the time of writing.
Amazon UK £20.99 £15.10
Amazon Canada No stock at the time of writing.
Jackson's £20.99 £13.64