Marie’s Chinese Watercolors in Pans

Recently I had been wondering, can I put my tube Marie’s Chinese Watercolors in a pan for convenience and to save paint?

I’ve been using Marie’s Chinese Watercolors a fair amount lately since I’ve been painting on Shu Xuan (ripe/cooked rice paper) a lot and these paints work so well on it. They have high opacity and a matte finish almost like gouache (opaque watercolor) and I enjoy them quite a bit.

Even though these aren’t the most expensive paints, the pigment load is pretty decent and I find a little tends to go a long way especially in my applications. This leads to some of my tubes starting to dry up since it takes a while to get through them. Of course I want to save the paint when possible, so I decided to try converting the tube paint to pan paint before it dried up completely. If the paint was still liquid enough in the tube, I just squirted it into empty watercolor pans and leveled the paint out with a toothpick. I found that if the paint was too dry to squeeze out, but still pliable, I could cut the tube open and pluck the paint out and squish it into empty watercolor pan. I like the extra-large 7.2ml Kuretake Gansai Tambi style pans because I often use large brushes that don’t fit well in smaller pans.

By the next day, the paint had dried and many colors looked crackled. This may be a problem if you plan on traveling with the paint (it might get crumbly and turn into paint confetti), but so far there hasn’t been a problem from moving it here and there in the studio. I’ve found it holds together better and is less loose and crumbly than I would imagine from the cracked look of the surface.

Of course the most important part about this solution is the paint needs to re-wet nicely from dried form, and I found that it does! I can pick up some paint pretty well with just a little water, and, like with most watercolor and gouache pans, a pre-soak spray with a water bottle on a pan will help a lot especially if I want to get a lot of paint going. I found that these pans are a lot less messy and more convenient than tubes so I even filled pans with paint that wasn’t drying up just to fill out my palette of colors. I’ve finished several small paintings using paint from this dried palette and it’s been working out fine, so I’d say it works and is a good solution for paints that are drying up in the tube or if you want a more convenient option than tubes since fiddling with tubes can be annoying and messy!

Questions or comments about Marie’s Chinese Watercolors, or anything else in this blog? Comment below!