my painting process for this study

Hey guys! This is a sneak peak for a video that I'm editing today. The video is using inexpensive art supplies, and I painted it using the Koh-I-Noor watercolor stack pack (set of 24 colors for $9.42 off Blick). This is the first watercolor set I bought myself when I was getting serious about art and wanted to try watercolors. I remember really loving this set and thinking it was pigmented and rich.

I started off with a pencil drawing on 11"x15" Canson XL Watercolor Paper with a Bic 0.5 mm pencil; the paper is $0.27 a sheet with the 50% off coupon from Michaels, and the pencil is $0.20 out of a pack of 12 for $2.37 from Target. (I don't know if you really care about the math, but I did it anyway hahah!)

Since my reference photo was cut off halfway down the face, I washi-taped the borders so the paint would be confined and I'd have a cool border at the end of this.

Unfortunately, even with the insanely positive attitude I came to these paints with, they did not fail to disappoint me. The colors in this set are so chalky, dull, and not pigmented, and this painting was a huge struggle for me. 

I'm definitely not judging if you have this set and enjoy it (I really loved it when I was starting off), but after trying better paints for a small budget, I don't know if I could recommend these.

Lucky for me, these paints did have a bright magenta color that I was able to create contrast and punchy colors with. This pink was the only color in the set that had any sort of pigment, so in the end, I used it straight out of the pan for most of the painting, and mixed it with some of the blues for a darker purple shadow tone.

The pink did layer well; even though it was still chalky, it was pigmented.

I even managed to get a really beautiful slate grey with the magenta, blue, and black! This was the most enjoyable phase of this painting. Even though the paints are chalky and the pigment doesn't move when it's placed on the paper, they layered well and even lifted pretty well too!

Luckily, the paints don't reactivate quickly on the paper, so they layer really well.

At this point, I started to have a lot of difficulties creating good shadow tones. The skin tones in the set weren't pigmented and didn't reach deeper tones, so I was forced to use the pinks and purples for shadows. I kept lifting these colors off of the chin, since the cooler tones made her look like she had five o'clock shadow (oh my gosh).

I had been painting for about two hours by this point, which, for what I'm painting, is a long time for me.

The hair was looking so ugly, that I thought to use salt to create a cool galaxy effect. I don't know if I just needed larger salt crystals, or the paint/paper combo suuuucked, but this didn't turn out, and I ended up having to scrape the dried salt off of the paper hahahaha.

I ended up using the black for finishing touches, going over the face with a ballpoint pen and my mechanical pencil to add some details. Luckily for me, this set does have a pretty opaque white (which I was skeptical would do anything), but it allowed me to add highlights on the face!!

If you look at the paints on the palette, you can see how much the pigments break up. 

And here's the final painting! Since there is no lightfastness information on these paints (and I can tell they'd fade instantly), I'm not going to be selling this painting and will probably just hang it up somewhere in my place. 

In conclusion, I do think it is possible to make insanely cheap art supplies work, especially if you have the time and patience to put yourself through this torture, but I don't recommend these paints as quality supplies. I feel that for a quick study or travel watercolor set, they perform better than the Winsor and Newton Cotman Set (I HATE THAT SET), and they layer and lift well. HOWEVER, most of the colors are not pigmented, and all of the colors are extremely chalky and hard to activate.

Let me know your thoughts! Do you like seeing processes like this?