Water Colour

Watercolour, also spelled Watercolor, pigment ground in gum, usually gum arabic, and applied with brush and water to a painting surface, usually paper; the term also denotes a work of art executed in this medium.

Just like many other art supplies, such as acrylic paints, watercolors come in two grades: student and professional. … If you are a beginner, or just want to test your hand a watercolor painting, student quality should be just fine.

Watercolor can be more challenging. With watercolor you can build up layers of colors while painting, but you work in a different order than you do with acrylic paint. … The key is timing, and it’s comes with experience and a lot of painting. You can work with watercolors as wet on wet or wet on dry.

As has been well described, above, using watercolor paint without added water can be a useful way for adding small highlights and contrasting hues, but it really isn’t a good way to paint large passages unless one is very skilled with watercolor paints.

If you’re planning on doing “real” watercolours, then the answer is probably no. Trying to use major amounts of water & pigment on a sheet of “regular” sketchbook paper is not going to work well at all – you’d need to upgrade to a watercolour Sketchbook.

Professional Grade

Cotton paper absorbs water in a beautiful way and helps us achieve that watercolor look when painting. Usually mould made. Professional grade cold press and rough papers have a nice textured or “toothy” surface. Handmade papers are considered the highest grade.

Watercolor paper for beginners:

I recommend beginning with  scholar sheet in either a natural or bright white. paper is very common so it’s easy to find and fairly affordable—much more so than heavy-weight paper—but will still hold up well under heavy washes.