If you’re interesting in learning how to use watercolor, we have the perfect starter set for beginners. You may be wondering what colors to start with, how many colors you need, or whether to go with tubes or pans. Choosing a palette is very personal – but you for sure need to include the primaries – yellow, red and blue. This will give you a foundation for mixing plenty of additional colors. The DANIEL SMITH Sketcher Half Pan Watercolor Set is the perfect place for beginning watercolor painters to start.

This set of six colors was developed by artist Liz Steel (with helpful feedback from other artists) as an excellent starter palette of watercolors.  It’s not only perfect for the beginner, but also for the artist who wants to upgrade to the DANIEL SMITH brand of watercolors, or the traveling artist who needs a good basic portable set for plein air and sketching days. A set of six half-pans is an excellent value to get started – it’s less expensive than the tubes and perfect for gift-giving!

The colors in our Sketcher Set were carefully chosen for their ability to mix beautifully, making gorgeous and useful secondary colors, as well as huge spectrum of other colors. Liz felt it was important to feature two slightly different groups of the three primary colors for the best color mixing – a “bright” triad and an “earth” triad.

The Bright Triad is for mixing bright colors:

The Earth Triad is for quickly mixing earthier shades:

The color mixing grid above shows some of the huge range of beautiful hues you can mix with the six colors in the Sketcher Set. This set was designed to work well with whatever add-on colors you might choose later to personalize your palette to paint your favorite subjects. The box includes 9 empty half pans which you can fill yourself from DANIEL SMITH watercolors in the tube.

Click here to learn more about all of the DANIEL SMITH Half-Pan Watercolor Sets.