When I returned to art as an adult, the first medium I really got into was watercolor.
A lot of artists I know have some amount of fear and trembling around watercolor because it has a deserved reputation for doing its own thing, regardless of your intention. Edges will bleed into one another, clean washes will granulate into splotches, colors you mixed will break back into their component parts, and some colors will elbow others out of the way to take their place on the page.
All of this happens in addition to the usual and customary difficulties with creating any art.
Personally, I think of watercolor as a collaboration with the materials, and occasionally find myself annoyed with oils because they need to be told every last thing you want them to do. Watercolor, on the other hand, can be given some marching orders and left to do its job with some minor direction here and there.
Given that watercolor is a collaboration with the materials, you might assume that the specific materials used matter greatly.
You would be correct.
I had the great good fortune to have this explained to me (in no uncertain terms) quite early in my learning process, well before I had acquired a lot of “student-grade” stuff.
Now, artist-grade paint and brushes can indeed be astonishingly expensive. But the good news is that they tend to last, especially if you buy the largest tubes available and take good care of your brushes.
Good paper, however, is also quite pricey—and you burn through it every time you paint.
The uncomfortable truth of any creative enterprise is that you have to be willing to make something that truly sucks any time you sit down to work. Making garbage probably isn’t your goal—we want to make cool things, beautiful things, great things, not trash!—but it happens to everyone. And when you are still learning the game, it happens often.
And while those brushes and tubes will still be there, that expensive paper is used up.
An obvious first instinct might be to buy a bunch of cheaper paper to practice on. While there are a few cases where this might be warranted, fluid mechanics are a critical part of the success or failure of watercolor painting, and cheap paper operates under a different set of physical parameters than the good paper does.
My solution might seem counterintuitive: even when I was still grad-student skint, I bought the good paper, because it makes such a difference in the behavior of the paint. And I would always buy more than I needed, because it makes such a difference in the behavior of the artist.
If you only have one piece of the “good paper,” you can’t afford to make a mistake. If you can’t afford to make a mistake, you might never start. Even if you do start, chances are you won’t get your best result, and, furthermore, you will likely miss the best lessons you would otherwise learn from making that piece.
If you can’t afford to make mistakes, you will hold back too much to reach the edges of your knowledge and skill—where learning takes place.
When the resources you need are overly scarce, it breeds an even more subtle resistance: Is this idea worthy of the good paper? Am I worthy of the good paper?
When the good paper is all you have, and there is an abundance of it, the answer to both becomes “yes” because what other option is there? Test a new brush or pigment. Try a new technique. That’s what it’s there for. And better yet, the result you get in your experimentation is the same result you will get when you use the “good paper,” because you are using the good paper.
And if your result isn’t what you’d hoped for, the good paper has another side that is perfectly serviceable.