Supplies

I’m by no means enough of an expert watercolorist to say “what’s the best paint brand” since there are doubtless things about watercolor and how to use it that I haven’t even begun to imagine. But as a person who just began watercolor last year, I am enough of a beginner, still, to know what feels easy or hard when you’re starting out. I’ve also tried a ton of paint in my short time since beginning watercolor because I enjoy trying things out. I feel like I’ve tried enough of the major artist-grade watercolor paint brands to get an idea of their personalities, and I have strong opinions about which ones are easier to work with for less-experienced artists.

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What’s the best color for the sea? Like the sky, the sea varies a lot by place and time of day, but where I live, in Northeastern United States, it rarely appears bright blue. Rather, it is usually more muted with tones of gray, green, and brown, as seen in the Maine lighthouse photo above.

How do you approximate that color? A lot has to do with context (you could use gray, for example, and in context it would appear to be a blue sea), but I wondered if there was a quick way to mix two colors – say, a blue and a red-orange to mute it – to come up with a muted blue that would remind me of this type of sea.

Here are my experiments.

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