Starter kit for watercolour painting

To start watercolour painting you need four things: a small set of paints, proper watercolour paper, one or two brushes, and water. Everything else is a nice extra. Beginners often overspend on paint and underspend on paper, which is the wrong way round.

Paper decides more about how your painting behaves than anything else. Thin cartridge paper buckles and pills as soon as it gets wet, which makes washes look patchy and can put new painters off for good.

• Look for paper sold specifically for watercolour, in a pad or a block. A block is glued on all four sides, so it stays flat while it dries.
• Cold-pressed (sometimes called NOT) paper has a gentle texture and is the usual all-rounder. Hot-pressed is smoother and suits fine detail. Rough has a pronounced tooth.
• Heavier paper handles more water without cockling. Check the weight on the cover and favour the heavier pads.
• Cotton paper, such as Arches, behaves differently from wood-pulp paper: washes stay workable for longer. It costs more, so many people practise on cellulose paper and keep a few cotton sheets for pieces they care about.

Pans are small blocks of dry paint in a tin. They are tidy, portable and ideal for painting outdoors or at the kitchen table. Tubes are moist paint you squeeze into a palette, easier for mixing large washes. Most beginners find a pan set the simplest start.

Student-grade paint is fine for learning. Artist-grade paint, from makers such as Winsor & Newton, Schmincke or Daniel Smith, uses more pigment and mixes more cleanly. A small artist-grade set of a dozen colours often serves better than a large student set of forty.

You do not need many colours. A warm and a cool version of each primary, plus a brown such as burnt sienna, will mix most of what you want and teaches you more about colour than a big tin.

• A round brush in a medium size. With a good point it does both broad washes and fine lines.
• A flat brush for laying even washes across skies and backgrounds.

Synthetic or synthetic-blend brushes are good value and hold their shape well. Natural squirrel-hair mops hold a lot of water and are lovely for washes, but they can wait.

• Two water jars, one for rinsing and one clean, so your colours stay bright.
• A white palette or an old white plate for mixing.
• Masking tape and a board to hold loose sheets flat.
• Kitchen roll for lifting colour and blotting the brush.
• A soft pencil and a putty rubber for light sketching.

Masking fluid, a large professional paint set, extra brushes and a heavy cotton paper block are all worth having once you know you will keep going. The same applies to instruction books and online courses: one good beginner book or a short course is plenty to begin with.

Your first few weeks are best spent on simple exercises: flat washes, graded washes, wet-on-wet blooms and mixing charts. Most early paintings will not work, and that is part of learning how water and pigment behave.

Watercolour is one of the hobbies in Flairmingo's Hobbies catalogue, with essentials, learning resources and level-up kit grouped together. Tell us your hobby taste and see which ones suit how you like to spend your time.