Emily Cartier

Yeah, I haven’t really worked out if it makes a difference, and I can’t really tell the difference with most honey when I eat it.
As a kid I found that most tube paint dried out much faster than I could use it. So far, the M Graham does better on that front. But I haven’t tried any brands that are supposed to set up better, because in my climate…[Read more]

I’ve got a 12 half pan metal paint box. It came with student grade watercolor paint, and after experimenting with it, I replaced the most useless colors with M Graham’s landscape set. That got me a couple classic earth pigments, a useful blue and a green and violet. After I experimented with those, I added an earth red. I can get good skin tones…[Read more]

I’m assuming by trays you mean a special watercolor box?
In my experience the specially made boxes are most helpful if you’re in the habit of making up custom mixes that get repeated over several pictures. If you don’t mix up paint much, or if you clean up your mixes every time, the special box adds very little.

Most of the time I use a fountain pen with Platinum Carbon Black ink. My TWSBI 580 is probably my favorite since it doesn’t dry out easily and has a nice enough XF nib. I’ve played around a little with dip nibs, and the same ink works fine. Haven’t messed around with watercolor on a dip nib, tho I know it’s possible.

My kit (such as it is) is a watercolor journal, A5 size, a 12 half pan metal watercolor box, a fountain pen and 2 water brushes. I only use about 7 pans in my set. All that fits easily in a wide range of bags. You can get lots fancier, but most of my successful watercolor paintings have only used 3-4 pigments anyway. The only tricky part is a 12…[Read more]