I am a firm believer in buying the best quality materials that you can afford… but I also don’t think that people should rush out buying expensive art materials if they will never end up using them.

Therfore I don’t condemn using a Cotman kit as the starting point – as soon as you know that this is something that you want to use… upgrade the colours to artist quality and I can assure you that you will never look back. Also some of the Cotman kits have great lightweight compact boxes! In setting up the following basic palette I came across my very first Cotman kit which I haven’t touched since Apr 2008 and did the following test.

I am pleasantly surprised that you CAN get nice strong mixes from the Cotman paints but you have to work them a lot harder (ie. pick up a lot of pigment) but of course you miss out on a lot of the lovely granulation etc etc.