Watercolour painting has long been prized for its ethereal beauty and enchanting charm. With the right tools, artists can create stunning masterpieces that evoke emotion and tell stories with every stroke of the brush. Among watercolour brands, one name stands out as a beacon of excellence and innovation: Winsor&Newton Professional Watercolours.
One of the hallmarks of Winsor&Newton Professional watercolours is their exceptional pigment quality. Sourced from the finest raw materials and carefully processed to ensure purity and intensity, these pigments deliver vibrant, long-lasting colours that will last over time. Whether you’re painting light layers or bold, expressive surfaces, you can trust the richness and depth of Winsor&Newton colors to bring your artwork to life. A whopping 79 shades are made up of just one pigment, ensuring colour purity and permanence.
Another feature is the excellent lightfastness of the colours. Each pigment has been carefully tested to withstand prolonged exposure to light, ensuring that paintings retain their beauty and brilliance for years to come. This commitment to lightfastness not only preserves the integrity of the artwork but also reflects Winsor&Newton’s commitment to quality and durability. Of the 100 shades in our range, 96 have achieved the highest lightfastness rating.
Winsor&Newton Professional watercolour exhibit unrivaled transparency due to the unique pigment dispersion in the manufacture of the colour. This is particularly important because transparency is the key characteristic of watercolour. As a result of the thinness of the watercolour film, all colours have a transparent quality on paper, allowing the reflective white of the paper to shine through. However, pigments do retain their natural characteristics to some degree. For example, transparent pigments refract light in much the same manner as stained glass, making jewel-like brilliance and clean mixing. Opaque colours such as cadmiums are likely to cover significantly more than transparent colours.
The varying transparency and opacity of a pigment will affect the optical character of the individual colour as well as how the colour mixes with other colours. The most transparent colours will enable you to create a pure glazing effect by applying a number of washes on top of one another. The more opaque colours give flatter washes and greater covering over previous washes. Opaque colours are also useful for toning down colour mixtures.
In addition to exceptional pigment quality and lightfastness, Winsor&Newton Professional watercolours are renowned for their wide range of colours and ingredients. With a palette of hundreds of shades, including traditional tones, contemporary favourites and unique special colours, artists have unlimited possibilities for experimentation and expression. Whether you prefer a classically elegant cobalt blue or a boldly vibrant quinacridone magenta, Winsor&Newton has colours to suit every artist.
NB! It’s always a good idea to start with primary colours in any colour palette. However, the primary colours are often not clearly indicated on the colour tubes. Below we have written down the names of the primary colours of Winsor&Newton Professional Watercolour in both a 3 tone palette and a 6 tone palette. Using the primary colours you can mix up an endless array of new shades.
A palette with 3 primary colours:
- Winsor Lemon
- Winsor Blue (Red Shade)
- Permanent Rose
6 Primary colour palette:
- Winsor Lemon
- Winsor Yellow
- French Ultramarine
- Winsor Blue (Green Shade)
- Permanent Rose
- Scarlet Lake
