Are you feeling inspired to paint and create but don’t know where to begin?

Are you a new Artist looking for affordable but good quality painting supplies to paint your dreams?

While starting your art journey, the first thing you need to tackle is buying the right art supplies. As a beginner, you should carefully choose your art supplies such that they are not only affordable but also of good quality.

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Why is it important to use the right art supplies ?

1. Improves your Quality of Art
2. Extremely Easy to Use
3. Boosts your Confidence

7 must-have painting supplies for beginners

1. Sketchbook
2. Pencil
3. Eraser
4. Pens
5. Watercolors
6. Brushes
7. Palette

1. Sketchbook

For beginners, I would always recommend using a sketchbook to work with. You get to keep a track of all your paintings and sketches, that way you get to see your daily progress in one place.

Tip: Your sketchbook pages should be of thickness 160 GSM or above so that you can easily work with not just pens but also with other mediums like watercolors.

2. Pencil

A good pencil is your friend. You can use it to draw a rough sketch or practice forms or create detailed drawings. Pencils are available in sets as well as can be purchased individually.

Tip: You should use a 2B pencil for drawing rough sketches, it has a soft lead and is great for adding details as well. 

3. Eraser

A quality eraser is very helpful while drawing. Regular store brought or school-grade erasers can tear or harm the paper. Hence, you should use a good quality eraser that will help eraser your pencil work without causing much damage to the paper.

4. Pens

Pens such as fine liners can be used to sketch, highlight, or outline your paintings as they are a great tool to start sketching. These pens are also available in sets of 5 or more. For beginners, I will recommend starting with 3 different nib sizes. 

Tip: Different brands have different size charts. You should get a size medium, small and extra small sized nib pens.

5. Watercolors

It is important to choose the right paints before starting your work. For starters, you should get a set of 12 or 24 color shades. You can mix and create as many colors as possible to experiment with using these shades you have.

Tip: You can also buy individual tubes of a single color from a high-quality range of colors that are likely to be used more.

6. Brushes

To start with you will need only 3 sizes of brushes. Round brush sizes 2, 6, and 8 are the best sizes to go with. You can also buy a brush set as per your requirement. But, in my experience, there only 2-3 brushes that you keep going back to while painting.

Tip: You can also buy a flat brush for painting backgrounds and adding water washes.

7. Palette

A simple palette is a good addition to your painting supplies. Surely there are many other options you can use to mix your paints like plastic plates, the lid of your watercolor paint set, and so on. But, using a palette will help you to mix your colors well. 

Tip: Use a palette with a closing lid, it will help protect any extra colors left on the surface from dirty or humidity and you can use those colors later.  

Additional supplies which come handy when you are painting but these are completely optional :

1. Sharpener

Using a good quality metal handle sharpener is very helpful. Metal handle sharpeners are easy to use and they prevent over-sharpening and pencil point breakage.

Tip: Sharpeners with an attached container to collect the pencil shavings helps to avoid messiness.

2. Masking Tape

While working with watercolors, you can use masking tapes around the edges of the paper or sketchbook to get a clean border.

3. Ruler

A long ruler can also come in handy while sketching structures or streets or simply adding borders to the page.

Tip: Use a stainless steel ruler as they are easy to clean.

4. Watercolor Sheets

Keep a few loose watercolor sheets handy to practice your watercolor techniques.

5. Other mediums

As a beginner, you should also explore other mediums of painting, don’t restrict yourself to just watercolors. Certain mediums don’t require any extra supporting tools like Oil pastels, color pencils, water-soluble pencils, and acrylics.

Tip: Give these mediums a try as well, you can also work on mix-media projects.

Hope this guide will help you choose your paint supplies.

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If you still have any questions or queries or need information about any specific art supply do leave a comment below.