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I made my first collage today from failed painting experiments! I have a stack of underwhelming pantings and color experiments that I've been meaning to do...something...with for a while. The stack keeps growing and I kept putting off trying anything with them, which was silly because they weren't doing me any good like that, so I might as well try something creative and different with them, right? Well another local artist I follow on Instagram made some cool collage cards from old paintings today, and I decided surely I could start with something small like that. So I went to...

When you're just starting out with watercolor, it can be overwhelming to contemplate the range of supplies and their cost. Pretty much anywhere I looked gave recommendations, but always had caveats that every artist is different, you'll have to just try it yourself to see. Who the heck has time and money to spend on trying every supply under the sun when you don't even know if you'll enjoy watercolor?! It can be very tempting to buy some cheap supplies to dip your toes in the water. In fact, I tried just that, and can confirm that it doesn't work....

Orange & blue is one of my favorite color combos to use in my abstract work. Color theory tells us that complementary colors mix to make neutrals, and I've had the best results with blue and orange. Red and green (or more accurately, in my experiments, viridian and a cool red) often work as well, but I've had zero luck finding a pleasing combination of purple and yellow. And I've tried! A LOT. Instead, purple and yellow just make mud, almost without fail, and the worst part is it's not even interesting mud. It's just ugly brown. Give me a lovely granulating...

Have you heard of Yupo paper? It's a tree-free, synthetic paper from Legion. Like many watercolor supplies, it's not particularly cheap, so I wanted to just dip my toes barely into the water with a tiny, 5x7 in. 10 sheet pad. I've seen it around on Instagram, but I ignored the lesson on it in the Watercolor Mastery class I took since I didn't have the supply at the time. (Honestly, I am also such a stereotype of a man--I hate to ask for directions or read instructions!) It took me a few days to work up to trying it...

Here are my suggestions for the absolute, bare minimum supplies to get started with watercolor. (These are not affiliate links--I haven't bothered to figure that system out yet, so they're just my legitimate recommendations.) Paint A Winsor & Newton Cotman set. (I have this specific one.) Even two years later it's still a great travel set, now that I've replaced a couple of the colors with ones I use more often. It also came with a tiny brush that I wouldn't recommend and that I've removed. While I also purchased a Sennelier 5 color set, and a Holbein 12 color set, I don't...