Watercolor Paint Consistency Scales, Ranked

Describing paint consistency is a continuing challenge for watercolor teachers. Paint consistency has a huge impact on the appearance of a watercolor painting, so it’s a big deal topic. Fresh-from-tube paint brushes onto the page totally differently from half-diluted paint, which is also totally different from watery paint (or painty water). Experienced artists can tell when their paint is the right consistency for the effect they want, but newbies don’t have that context, and it’s hard to communicate verbally. Many artists use analogies to other substances. I personally had an a-ha moment when Ruth Wilshaw likened gouache at a “sweet spot” consistency to slippery dish soap.

Let’s take a look at other ways artists describe paint consistency.

Scales I’ve Seen in the Wild

Dairy Products Scale

This is the most common one that I have seen in multiple sources. Paint is described as being the consistency of milk, cream, or double cream.

The concept makes sense; milk products are something that many people have experience with that range, sometimes subtly, through different levels of thickness. I like that all the items in the scale are from the same universe.

One nitpick: I’m not sure the differences between steps are that noticeable. I’ll concede that cream is thicker than milk, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the difference in terms of paint.

I also wouldn’t say that extensive experience with dairy is universal, particularly at the thicker end. I use milk in my cereal and cream in my coffee, but I’m not too sure what double cream is.

I also find this scale slightly disgusting. I don’t hate milk but I don’t like thinking of my paint as milk or my milk as paint.

Grade: B

Tea to Butter Scale

A variation on the above is called the “tea to butter” scale, and the steps are tea, coffee, milk, cream, and butter.

This adds more watery steps before milk, which I’m not sure as necessary. Also, the same problem exists that many of the steps aren’t that different (milk and cream as from before; tea and coffee as well; and heck coffee and milk), but the jump to butter is huge. I think of butter as being nearly solid, something you wouldn’t even get from tube paint.

I also just conceptually find it odd that there’s two hot drinks and three milk products. Not all of them are things you use in hot drinks, either (unless you’re making that weird butter coffee). It feels kind of arbitrary.

Grade: C

Marc Taro Holmes’s Tea, Milk, and Honey Scale

A final variation on the milk theme comes from Mark Taro Holmes of Citizen Sketcher, and this is tea, milk, and honey. This is also conceptually appealing as all three items are things you’d use to make tea, and it doesn’t have the categorical arbitrariness of tea-to-butter. Also, I understand what honey is (unlike double cream), and I can relate it to watercolor paint consistency (unlike butter). That liquid sort of honey that comes in plastic bottle shaped like a bear is a pretty good consistency stand-in for watercolor fresh from the tube. Especially watercolor paints that contain honey!

I still find the image kind of unappealing, but I know I’m particularly sensitive to disliking sticky watercolor.

Grade: B+

Bruce MacEvoy’s Watery to Syrupy Scale

Bruce MacEvoy of course lays out an impossibly systematic way of finding the optimal consistency, recommending a procedure involving scales that I am definitely not going to do, and insisting that it will be different for each paint so you have to test all of them. Anyway, at least he offers a few shorthands: syrupy, creamy, fluid, and watery. The idea of syrup and cream also call to mind the honey/milk scale, though this feels less like an intentional attempt at metaphor and more just a side effect of the fact that English language adjectives for consistency tend to fall back on food. He further describes the categories with other foods:

• Syrupy: “the thick consistency of corn syrup or molasses.”
• Creamy: “the viscous consistency of cream or olive oil.”
• Fluid: “the fluid consistency of milk”
• Watery: “the same consistency as pure water”

These are all foods/things you would find in the pantry, though perhaps not all things you’d use in the same recipe. It’s nice that there are multiple options given for some of the stages, though personally I think olive oil is much thicker than cream. I just… I don’t know, something about the word “creamy.”

Grade: B-

Cara Rosalie Olsen’s … Scale

I’m not even sure what to call this. I was introduced to this scale in Cara Rosalie Oslen’s Botanical Watercolor Painting for Beginners.

For our purposes, I will be using four main consistencies:

80% paint/20% water = horseradish—abbreviation HRC

50% paint/50% water = cough syrup—abbreviation CSC

20% paint/80% water = broth—abbreviation BC

5% paint/95% water = lightest consistency—abbreciation LC

Cara Rosalie Olsen, Botanical Watercolor Painting for Beginners

I just… don’t know where to begin – that these things aren’t in the same category? that the combination of food and medicine is yucky? that “lightest consistency” is functionally unlabeled? that I have no idea the consistency of horseradish but that “horseradish consistency” is never what I will think when I see the initials HRC? – but I think the thing I find most upsetting is the use of arbitrary initialisms. I’d forgive the use of broth and cough syrup (though could easily be corn syrup and not make me think of Dayquil soup) if the others were, like, apple juice and dijon and you could make it A, B, C, D in order. Instead, you have to keep looking up in the front of the book every time you encounter a random sequence of letters.

I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t get much further in this book.

Grade: D

Liz Steel’s Pasty/Juicy/Watery Scale

This isn’t an analogy, it’s just a set of descriptive words Liz Steel has landed on to describe paint consistencies. And you know what? They work. And they don’t make me feel vaguely ill. There’s only three. I can keep it in my head. No problem.

Lacks cute theming, but I’m starting to think that I can do without.

Grade: A–