This is my new Winsor & Newton heavy duty watercolor box.
As you can see it's got two good sized mixing areas, and one has more angled slanted areas with a deeper well to them than the standard light weight boxes (as shown below with my old Schmincke box).
To me the best things about this box are the deep mixing areas which allows for mixing up a really big puddle of color without making a mess, and the large area in the box for brushes. What I always felt was missing from my Schmincke box was a large enough area to keep brushes as you can see my large size 12 round brush takes up a lot of room in the Schmincke box below, but I have plenty of room for 4 brushes including the size 12 round and even a pencil and a small ballpoint pen in the Winsor & Newton heavy weight box.
The W&N box is just a bit larger, and just a bit heavier, but the design makes it much more functional to me. It can take 12 whole pans, but you could easily put in two half pans in each of the whole pan spaces and get more colors in as needed, which I will probably do eventually as money permits and my wish for other colors in the palette developes.
I got this new box from Ken Bromley art supplies at www.artsupplies.co.uk as Winsor & Newton doesn't currently sell any of their pan colors in metal boxes on the US for some unknown reason, but you can get a similar box from Jerry's Artarama at www.jerrysartarama.com in the US and can fill it with your own pans of whatever watercolors you like. Unfortunately they only seem to have a half pan version at Jerry's last time I looked, which is less useful for me than the whole pan box as I prefer to have whole pans of my most used colors (burnt umber, french ultramarine, an orangey red like vermillion or dose dore or something like that, and aureolin or winsor yellow). Another interesting thing to note is that the whole pan Winsor and Newton watercolors are not available in the US either (why?!) but they can also be purchased from Ken Bromley Art Supplies in England if you want to switch out some of the colors (as I did right away and will probably do more of as I tend to change my palette a bit considering what sort of painting I am doing regularly). I switched out winsor red for rose dore and lemon yellow for Indian yellow right away and plan a few more changes when I get some colors in half pans soon. As you can see in my Schminke box (which actually is currently filled with Lukas paints from Jerry's) below, I normally keep a larger palette than just the 12 in the new W&N box above.
This is my old Schmincke watercolor box which I recently refilled with Lukas paints from Jerry's Artarama. Lukas paints are much more economically priced than many artist quality paints, and I recommend them to those who can't afford the more expensive ones but still would like artist quality. I prefer to use them with a bit of extra gum arabic (I like holbein gum arabic paste as a little goes a long way and it comes in a tube instead of a bottle which makes it easier to take when traveling). I find that the Lukas paints feel a little lacking in gum arabic in their formulation (for my taste anyway), so I add a drop of it on my palette as I am working and add a very tiny bit to mixtures as I work which makes these paints feel better to me (more like W&N or Sennelier, which are my usual favorites). Anyway, this is my largest selection of colors in a box that I can comfortably carry around with me, so I take it when I have no idea what I might want for colors because this one pretty much has all the bases covered. I have smaller boxes, but the problem with the mini boxes is that they don't fit a decent sized brush or even a water brush inside them easily which I find a bit annoying. I will do another post some day about some of my smaller palette boxes if anyone is interested in that and the pros and cons of the those.
So, these are the two boxes of watercolors that I am using most frequently lately. I expect that the heavy weight box will be a fixture for me from now on as it works so well with the large brush I like to have with me for doing washes and mixing up the quantities of paint that are needed for such a large brush. I am undecided about whether the large brush will stay in the light weight box since it's so tight on space for brushes. I have two size 12 sable brushes from Creative Mark, which are excellent and really reasonably priced in comparison to Winsor & Newton series 7 brushes which I have only been able to manage to get up to a size 4, but one may have to live at home as it's just too tight in the box with it in there and I can't fit a pencil or pen in there now which I am not thrilled about.
All in all they are both good boxes, both can fit either whole or half pans which is a must for a box for me, and they both fit some brushes in the box (though some brushes need to have the handle shortened to fit in either one). The heavy weight box has mixing areas that work better for me when I do large washes, but the light weight box works fine as long as I don't need the deep wells for mixing. The brush space is much larger on the heavy weight box, but adequate in the lightweight box for about 2 or 3 brushes and a pen or pencil. The lightweight box clicks closed a bit tighter than the heavyweight box. The tin of the lightweight box (as the name implies!) is lighter and thinner, while the heavy box is thicker and will take more of a beating (my old Schmincke box is about 17 years old and is scratched and quite dented in several places, though still very useable). I expect to use both for a long time, though I may slightly prefer the new W&N one now!
No comments:
Post a Comment