A Watercolor Deal Breaker with Steve Griggs

When you’re looking for watercolor paints you have two options: tubes or cakes/pans.

Ep.59 guest Steve Griggs says both work great, but only if they can pass one simple test.

It’s the viscosity test. Your paints have to be able to actually mix different thicknesses (or viscosities) of watercolor paint.

The three thicknesses are:

(1) Yogurt

(2) Heavy Cream

(3) 2% Milk

Each of these requires different amounts of pigment. If your tube or cake can’t give you enough pigment to help make these, it might mean you need to toss them.

Put it to Practice:

Your watercolor pigments will show up as either tubes or cakes (also known as pans.)

With a tube, you squeeze out a moist pigment. With cakes (or pans), you’ll begin with a hardened pigment that you then add water to release the color.

Tubes make it pretty easy to get the thicker viscosity of paint because you can use fresh pigment and thin it down with water.

If you are using tube paints that have dried out, they may not be done for. Spritz them with a healthy amount of water, cover them and then check back in 15 minutes.

If you can pull enough pigment out for all three thicknesses, great. If not, it might be time to toss them and reapply new paint.

Pans and cakes come as hardened pigment. With professional grade pans, you’ll still be able to get all three thicknesses of paint. But this may be harder with student and craft grade pans.

The reason why all of this matters is because thick paint is how you get bold color in watercolor. Otherwise, all of your paintings will look like they were made with tea. Because in some ways, that's the consistency of color they were made with. And you won't actually be able to get bolder color - even with quality color mixing skills- if you don't have access to thicker paint mixes.