Which materials? 2) Travel/pocket watercolour sets

Yesterday I posted about the different travel sketchbooks that I’ve used over the last 8 years. Today I’d like to look at the subject of travel watercolour paint sets.

If you read that post, you’ll know that even though I haven’t used specifically watercolour sketchbooks the Moleskine and Seawhite books that I favour will take watercolour pretty well, and although the majority of sketches that I make while abroad are plain ink, it’s nice to know that I have the option of colour if I want. Even a dauber with no great watercolour skill like myself can enhance sketches by adding colour.

So, why specifically a travel paint set? Why not just use an ordinary set? Well, sketching on the move is easier the less equipment that you carry. If you take the full watercolour set that you use at home, you’re not only going to have the set, but also brushes and other paraphernalia. Will you be able to use it balancing it on your knee, or while you’re standing up? How is your set going to cope in your bag, especially if you’ve just been using it?

So, in the last 8 years I have bought three different pocket travel paint sets. If you look at the photo you’ll see all three. My first is the set at the top of the photo. This was an own brand set by British retailer WH Smith. Soon afterwards I bought the middle set – this is in the Winsor and Newton Cotman Range. Then just yesterday I bought the bottom set – Daler Rowney Aquafine.

Now, I know from experience what I think about the first two, but I’d never used Daler Rowney paints before. So, I came up with an idea – I would take three pages from my Seawhite book I tried yesterday, because this seems to take watercolour well. I would draw pretty much the same scene in ink on each page. Then I would paint one page with each of the three sets to compare. The photograph shows the

scene on each of the pages. Every year in the UK our sovereign has two birthdays. One is their real birthday, commemorating the day they were born. This is a private affair. Then they have their official birthday. I kid you not. The official birthday is usually celebrated in June as the chances are that there will be better weather for celebrations. As it happens, despite his real birthday being in November, King Charles III’s official birthday this year falls upon the Fifteenth of June – incidentally my real birthday. I can’t afford to have an official one as well. The main ceremony on the official birthday is the Trooping of the Colour, where members of the guards regiments put on their finery and parade. Very colourful it is too. So this is what I chose to depict, thinking it should give me an opportunity to use a range of different colours from each and compare the results. I made the trial as fair as I could by using the same paper for each and he same subject matter as close to the same picture as I could draw it. For the record, each set comes with its own brush and I only used the brush provided with each set.

So, let’s begin with WH Smith’s own brand travel set. This is still available and is listed on WH Smith’s own website as retailing at £10, which is the bottom/middle end of the market. Yes you can get sets this size that are cheaper but most of these are specifically marketed for kids, and so there would be a question mark in my mind about the quality.

So, the set is bigger than the other two but still would fit easily within a coat pocket. As you can see, it has 12 colours – white, yellow, red, crimson, orange, 2 blues, 2 browns, 2 greens and black. It’s a sensible range and you can mix any other colours you want. The brush is okay for a travel brush.

Now, if I tell you that my set is already 8 years old, the something might strike you. It really hasn’t been used much. There must be a reason for that. Well, there is. I find the colours rather insipid. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that this particular sketch came out as well as it did. That red is a lot more vibrant than I expected. However if you look at the pink of the street, and the blue of the sky you’ll maybe get an idea of what I mean. Compare this with what I produce using the Winsor and Newton set.

Let’s have a look at the set first. Yes, this one has been used. If I tell you that this is my second Winsor and Newton Cotman travel set that might give you an idea how much I like this brand. It’s currently retailing on special offer on Amazon at £15. If you are prepared to shop around you can even get it a little bit cheaper

sometimes. Hobbycraft are currently asking £20. That’s Hobbycraft for you. It’s the smallest travel set I have, which makes it easy to use anywhere Now, you might well have noticed one of the strange features of this set. There’s no black. There’s everything else you need, but there’s no black. You may well have been told that you shouldn’t use black in watercolours anyway, so this must be deliberate on Winsor and Newton’s part. To be fair it does have the effect of making you think about how you are going to render the places where you would have used black. 

I make no bones about it, I think Winsor and Newton are a quality brand and I like sketching with this set. Yes, I made the sky a bit blue for some people’s liking, but it serves as a demonstration of what you can do with this set that you can’t with the WH Smiths. It’s a small thing, but the travel brush in this set was my favourite of the three as well – just that bit finer than the other two. As regards the black, well the paints are all standard half pans, so if it bothered me that much I could buy a standard half pan ivory black and put it in place of a colour I used less. Haven’t needed to yet.

As I said earlier I bought the Daler Rowney Aquafine travel set yesterday and this is the first sketch I’ve made with them. I paid just under £10 for them which is about as cheap as you can get them by shopping around. This is the same price as the WH Smith set, but Daler Rowney are specifically an art supplies company. I’m not sure that their name carries quite the same cachet as Winsor and Newton but whenever I’ve used their products in the past they have been of good quality in my opinion. The photograph shows the set after I made the painting. It’s slightly bigger than the Winsor and Newton but not significantly so. I was slightly disappointed when I first saw the range of colours. 

There is a black, but only one shade of green and only darker blues. Mixing colours can be awkward when you’re sketching outdoors and chances are you’re going to be doing a bit of foliage, necessitating different shades of green so that’s a drawback. I don’t find that these paints mix quite so well as the Winsor and Newton paints do, which is why I couldn’t get such a bright blue for the sky. But on the positive side, to my mind this set is clearly better to use than the WH Smith set which cost the same. (Actually, I think it cost the same - £10 – when I bought it in 2016.) With this set I came closest to the proper colour of the roadway and I think the red of the uniforms is every bit as good as W&N, if not slightly more vibrant. But the W&N set is so consistent – the colours all work together so well in a way that they don’t quite do in the DR set. Still, I have to say that bearing in mind the relative cost I am rather impressed with DR. With a little practice with it I reckon I could probably get results which are even closer to W&N.

So, here’s the three sketches for comparison–

You know looking at it I think there’s even less to choose between W&N and DR than I thought. Still just about prefer Winsor and Newton, but I’d be happy to use DR as well in the future. WH Smith, not so much.