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Watercolour Pans
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Posted
We have had threads in the past about the merits of watercolour tubes against watercolour pans.
Up until about a month or so ago I had always used watercolour tubes, believing them to be the best way to use the medium. However, totally fed up with amount of paint I was wasting with it drying out if I couldn't paint for a few days, I started to gradually replace my colours with pans.
What a revelation!! They don't dry out as they become easily workable in a way that tube paint doesn't and the amount of rich pigment you can pick up on a brush is wonderful. I have now replaced about 90% of my colours with pans and will shortly replace them all. I am totally sold on pans now and will never go back to tubes.
Although you can re-wet tube paint in your paintbox - I found that the constant re-wetting ended up diluting the paint which resulted in a watery mix which didn't give the effect I wanted.
It may be that my way of working makes the pans a lot more suitable for me as I have a paintbox with 24 full wells in it which means that I have 24 colours at my disposal all of the time. I won't use all the colours in every painting so that is when some dry out badly. With pans, it doesn't matter as they are supposed to dry up and then are easily re-wetted without loss of consistency.
It has been a bit of an experiment (and an expensive one if it had proved not to work!) but I think I have finally overcome a very irritating problem.