Watercolors are a great companion for many notebooks. If you like to draw or just decorate your pages, adding a splash of color is easy with a pocket size watercolor set. Lately I’ve become a bit of a collector of different watercolor boxes, some of which I’ve mentioned in previous posts where I’ve reviewed watercolor sketchbooks. But today I’ll give you a rundown on my full collection! (Since I’ve added a few new items since I last wrote about them in 2016.)

I’m going to go mostly in chronological order of when I originally acquired these sets, but the first watercolor set I’ll talk about actually only came back into my possession recently. This little Winsor and Newton set was amongst some things my mother had stored for me, so I don’t think I’d seen it in at least 40 years. It is still in its original packaging and doesn’t look like it was used much. I was glad it still had its color chart inside. The packaging says these sets are intended for “beginners or serious amateurs” so the paints are presumably not artist grade.

I have another set that is basically identical. I know I’ve had this one since at least the late 1990s, but I can’t remember if it was another one from my childhood, or if I bought it as a college student or young adult. As of 2013, it was the watercolor set I used most often– which wasn’t really all that often. I liked the tiny size, but I may have found using this set rather frustrating. When I tried it again recently, I found it very hard to re-wet the pans enough to get much vibrancy in the colors– most of them looked very washed out. I’ve seen one of these for sale on eBay for $60.00– not sure if it’s really that valuable but maybe these older paints are made of pigments that are no longer used today?

As of 2013, I also owned another Winsor and Newton set. I have no memory of when or how I bought it or if it was given to me. This is the Cotman Compact Box. (W&N offers various sets with names that are very similar, and that have changed over the years, so it can be confusing to figure out which one is which just by the names.) The Compact Box is light years beyond those first tiny boxes– it holds 14 half pans, and has lots of mixing space due to a slide-out extra palette. There’s a little cup that can sit in the middle or be mounted on the side, for water or extra mixing space. (It’s very shallow, so I don’t think it’s really that great for holding water.) You can hook your thumb through the opening in the middle so it’s easy to hold. The Cotman colors are so vibrant compared to my old set, it’s amazing. And it’s a bargain– list price $43.99 but often discounted to $20-25. Cotman is W&N’s student grade paint line, so amount of pigment is lower and colors may not be as saturated or permanent as professional grade paints, but they are a great value if you are still learning or want to just knock around and have fun with color. There really isn’t much not to like about this set, but I have a weird preference for certain shapes and sizes, and the tapered, square-ish shape of this box doesn’t really appeal to me, so I recently gave it to my partner to use. I had not been using it for many years, since I got interested in using professional artist grade paints and bought the next set.

This is yet another Winsor and Newton set, the one I’ve used the most. It’s now discontinued, but I just love this metal box. It’s a cute size and shape, but with the fold-out mixing space, it gives you plenty of room to work. The tray that holds the pans is removable, so I suppose you could use the bottom of the box for even more mixing space if you had a place to set the palette tray down. But it’s really meant for painting on the go, with the tin in your hand and your thumb hooked into the hinged ring on the bottom. This set came with 12 half pans but the design of the box makes it easy to add several more, as I have done, transferring some pans from the Cotman set. I don’t remember how much this set cost, but the colors are gorgeous and intense, and the box is so much more pleasing, I’ve never regretted buying it. There is no currently available W&N set that is quite equivalent to this one– there is a 14-pan artist grade set in the same case as the Compact Box above, or a 12-pan “Field Box” that is an odd chunky shape with fold-out mixing panels and a built-in water bottle.

Though Winsor and Newton doesn’t sell sets in these tins anymore, you can buy an empty tin that’s almost identical and fill it with any other half pans, or buy empty half and/or full pans and fill them with W&N tube paint and allow it to dry. I tried doing this with some gouache but it didn’t work well– I think gouache is best used right out of the tube.

My next watercolor set purchase was this lovely little Daler Rowney set of 18 quarter pans, which I believe I first heard about from a commenter on this site. I came across it in an art store in Paris, and fell in love. This is the slimmest watercolor set I’ve ever seen: 1-15/16 wide by 4-7/8 long and about half an inch thick if you count the thumb ring on the bottom. There may be some other pre-filled sets that are technically tinier in terms of total volume but those are sets with maybe 8 half pans at most. I’ve never seen any other set that has quarter pans. These are artist grade paints, and the colors are great. I think this is a really nice color selection– it might have more shades of red/pink than I probably need, but it lacks nothing, as far as I’m concerned. (There is no white, but I don’t find that essential.) But the pans are so tiny, and there’s not a ton of mixing space, so it’s not as practical to use as my W&N metal tin. I also wondered how I would refill it if I used up some of the colors– there are no plastic pans to swap in and out, just blocks of paint that sit in little metal wells. The wells aren’t totally sealed off from each other, so adding tube paint might end up in a mess. But apparently people cut half pans in half somehow to refill quarter pans. I think you’d have to trim them even more than that to make them fit, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it!

Next we have yet another Winsor and Newton set. Maybe after feeling a little cramped with the quarter pans I decided I need to stretch out, because this is the first set I’ve owned that has full pans. These are Cotman paints again, and what I really love about this set is the shape of the box. It’s the same size as my favorite notebooks! There’s a decent amount of mixing space divided into 6 wells. The paints are held in place– sort of– by removable plastic dividers. The dividers aren’t held in very tightly so everything can go flying pretty easily if you’re not careful, and it sounds like a lot of people remedy that by sticking the pans down with rubber cement or some other non-permanent adhesive. But the nice thing is that this box can also be configured to hold half pans, or a combination of full and half pans. I think this full pan set has been discontinued, but there is a similar, larger box that has 24 full pans, and there’s another version of this same box that we’ll get to in a minute!

Here’s the other Winsor and Newton set in that same plastic box, which I couldn’t resist. Even though I haven’t really been using my full-pan set much, I really liked the idea of using the box and customizing it. Maybe even having two of these boxes, with some paints in one and pencils in the other. I was looking on eBay to see if I could get another full pan set and just re-use the extra box, but then I discovered that this half-pan Cotman Complete Pocket Set is available. It comes with a pencil and a kneaded eraser (an unneeded kneaded eraser) in addition to the usual mini-brush. (It also came with 16 half pans, but I transferred some of them to other sets, hence the scrappy selection below.) The price isn’t too bad, so I snapped one up. The box is slightly different than my other one, with a smoother texture on the outside– I prefer the older version. But I’m going to play around with what might fit inside. Many pens are a little too long, but my Pentel refillable brush pen and Pigma Micron pens fit! As does my favorite Sakura Koi waterbrush. So I might set up one box with watercolors, and one with a waterbrush, pen, pencil and a folded-up paper towel, which always comes in handy for brush cleaning.

This Sennelier paint set was a recent purchase. It’s in a very similar box to the W&N set, though the box is actually deeper. The extra space, and the fact that the paint chunks aren’t stuck down, led to the paints all falling out of their pans, so I was confronted with a big jumble when I first opened the set. Luckily I was able to get everything back in order with the handy plastic color guide. I say “handy” because I like how it shows each color, but I’m not sure the way it flaps over the paints is actually convenient: you have to hold it out of the way while you’re painting, or just remove it. But it does do a good job separating the paints from the mixing wells, in case you have to close up the box in a hurry before everything’s dry. (Not that that is a good idea: I’ve never had this happen but some watercolor paints can get moldy if they don’t dry properly, and I’ve read that since Sennelier’s paints contain honey, they can be susceptible to that.) These are artist grade paints in Sennelier’s L’Aquarelle line, so they weren’t super cheap at $53– but I snapped that up since I had previously seen prices around $60-75. Annoyingly, I later saw them priced even lower at $47.34 on Amazon, but that price may no longer be valid by the time you read this. All these prices are a lot better than the list price of $132! (Sennelier also has a cheaper student grade line called Le Petite Aquarelle, but they don’t come in this exact tin.) I haven’t used this set very much yet, but the paints seem great in terms of being very vibrant. However, I found the selection of colors a little disappointing– to me, it’s odd not to have both a warm and cool yellow, as they can mix very differently with other colors. I’d want to add a cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, maybe a raw ochre and an ivory black. This should be easy to do as they sell half pans individually, but you only have to buy 4 or 5 individual colors before it costs as much as the whole set! I may not bother, as I don’t think these are different enough from W&N to need a whole separate set of the same colors. I may end up mixing and matching brands as I run out of certain colors.

I recently fell victim to one more infatuation: the Art Toolkit. I had been seeing lots of online buzz about them but for some reason I had only ever noticed the tiny business-card size watercolor pallets, which weren’t interesting to me. But then I saw that they were now offering the larger “Folio” size. It measures 5-5/16″ x 3-3/8″ x 1/4″– just a smidgen smaller than my favorite notebook size. How could I not fall in love? And I find this size more practical too, allowing a bit more room for swishing a brush into the paints and mixing colors. I went a bit bonkers and decided to order a whole kit including the palette, a few extra pans, a carrying case and a couple of accessories. It’s a really nice kit– I love the design and slimness of the palette, the magnetic base that holds the pans down, and how you can customize the layout and pan size for your various colors. And it’s nice to have a case that has lots and pockets to hold everything, with enough room left over to tuck in a pocket size sketchbook too. I put the colors I use most in larger pans, and added some extra mixing pans. I currently have 13 colors but could see myself maybe expanding to something closer to the Daler Rowney palette. I can’t wait to play with this more!

The only tube watercolors I own are a set I got for an absurdly low price at a Jerry’s Artarama store, student-grade Lukas Studio Aquarell. I hadn’t even tried them yet, but used them to fill the Art Toolkit palette, and then decided to add an additional shade of green, which I purchased as a standalone tube of Winsor & Newton professional grade Hooker’s Green. Considering that I only paid something like $20 for the whole Lukas set (on sale), their quality seems pretty decent, though I haven’t tested them much yet. But it’s interesting to see how differently the W&N paint dried in its pan– totally smooth with no cracks or bubbles. Not sure if that’s significant, but it certainly looks more pleasing. If I find myself using this palette a lot, I will probably upgrade the paints in it to professional grade ones.

That is my entire watercolor arsenal– for now. Hopefully forever! I don’t feel the need to keep buying more and more sets– in a way I’m curious to try other brands like Schmincke and Daniel Smith, but given my level of art practice, I don’t think I need to be that much of a connoisseur. I know I like to have certain colors in my palette, a certain size/shape of palette, and good quality paints with vibrant, highly pigmented colors. But beyond that, I haven’t found a reason to prefer one brand over another. For now I have plenty of options to play with– I can keep a watercolor set in every room of the house, and in my car, in case the mood to paint suddenly strikes me!