Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolor Review, 1 Year LIGHTFAST TEST, 109 Color Chart with Swatch Cards

Brand overview for Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolors. These paints are made in France (with the company headquarters in the UK). The watercolors come on a 109 color dot card, in 5 or 14ml tubes, half or full pans and various tin sets. This brand focuses on mainly lightfast pigments, with over 90% of their catalog being "permanent" and 80 colors being single-pigment paints. I'll be sharing details about my experience, good and bad, over the past 5 years of using their watercolors. The full range complete catalog has been swatched, you can view it in the video or at the bottom of this page.

 

Where to buy? These items were used in the video above. The color wheel palette can be found in my shop here. USA buyers - Individual tubes, pans or dot card available at Blick here. UK buyers - available at Jacksons here.

 

 

Unlike their popular student grade line called Cotman, these professional quality paints have a very high pigment load and vibrancy. There is none of the odd textures or dullness (likely lack of pigment load / extra binders) that you may have noticed in Cotman. The professional colors also have flow additives (animal based ox gall) and are not vegan like all but 3 colors in the Cotman range are. These professional paints offer more expensive pigment options as well as slightly toxic options like Cobalts and Cadmiums. I do not recommend their "Cadmium Free" non-toxic alternatives, which I'll elaborate upon further down the page. This line is overall limited in regards to unique pigments. They do not carry as many granulating or rare earth browns, like Roman Szmal paints, nor do they have an extensive mineral or gemstone selection like those found in Daniel Smith.

If you have a large paint collection, or have ever gotten a general pan set with basic mixing colors, you may not find it worthwhile to buy too many individual colors from this brand. A huge portion of their catalog is repetitive, similar looking pigments for you to pick and choose from. With a general lack of unique colors, and a fairly high price tag, there were only about 20 colors I really wanted to try. Even though I didn't choose it, Winsor Lemon PY175 is a beautiful bright version of this useful non-toxic alternative to Cadmium Yellow PY35. It's a bright cool yellow that could also be used as a primary mixing color. I didn't mention it in my video because I prefer the version from Holbein instead. I also did not pick Lemon Yellow Deep PY159, despite it being rare. I felt that it wasn't unique enough of a color to justify using it for the sake of it only being available from W&N. It is less transparent and weaker than other light yellow alternatives and has a dull mid tone similar to very diluted PY150 Transparent Yellow/Nickel Azo. Because PY175 or PY35 work so well for a bright lemon yellow, I had no real reason to add PY159 to my palette.

Personal favorites: They do have some colors I feel are worth checking out. While some of these pigments can be found in a few other brands, these versions are notable. Their Potters Pink PR233 (only offered by a handful of the top pro grade brands) is a beautiful granulating dusty brown-pink which makes beautiful color separating mixtures when paired with the vibrant Cobalt Teal PG50. The Cobalt Green Deep, Permanent Mauve, Ultramarine Violet and Cobalt Blue Deep are remarkably deep, dark and heavily granulating. These pigments are typically a little unique between brands, with subtle variations due to the part of the world they were mined and manufactured: They also offer another rare pigment, the fugitive but well-loved Rose Madder Genuine. Rose Madder is a historical pigment created by grinding and laking the roots of the Madder Plant. It has a color that artists over the centuries have appreciated for being similar to rose petals. Winsor and Newton is one of the last companies to still offer it in watercolor form.

LIGHTFAST TEST RESULTS: I have completed a 1 year window test of the diluted range (min 50% water to paint ratio). This gives a clear indication of which colors will fade over time (compared to a more durable, full strength/masstone test).

There are some fugitive colors, mostly the same that you would expect to find in any brand. Prussian Blue, Aureolin and Opera Pink are fugitive. Unfortunately PB27 Prussian and PY40 Aureolin are also often labeled as LFI in most brands due to an incorrect test from a pigment supplier or ASTM many years ago which has not been updated. These colors fade in any brand, just like Opera which contains a fugitive fluorescent dye in addition to the PR122 magenta base color. Olive Green contains PY65 (not present in any of their other colors) which appears to have subtle fading when used extremely diluted. There was minor fading in Rose Dore, made worse by the fact that this color is particularly weak and pale. Most of the other colors were LFI / BW8 / max lightfast, with the exceptions of some reds and violets with minor fading within the acceptable LFII / BW7 range.

 

PV14 Cobalt Violet can fade due to environmental factors, unrelated to sun light. Please be aware that in most areas of the world this may never be a problem. See image for notes about fading results. This color appears to have a problem when exposed to certain environments with prolonged heat, humidity or PH level changes. This could particularly be a problem if you are selling paintings that are destined for beach houses, where large windows let in beams of light and humid ocean air.

 

The tube and pan formula is not the same for Winsor & Newton Professional watercolors.  The company has stated that their pans will re-activate easier with a damp brush than the paint from a tube would, after dry. It was not clear if this is purely because of a more dense pigment load in their intentionally dry version. This can cause trouble when a certain type of pigment requires more or less binder, water, fillers or re-wetting agent to not become brittle in the pan. Problem: I've also had an issue where Indigo developed this odd white surface texture (I assume a type of mold?) when using the tube paints dry in pans. This happens soon after pouring it, after it dries, without any contamination of brushes/water. (Though, in general I use purified water when I paint anyway to limit mold exposure from tap water into my supplies.) I can't rule out that this is some sort of patina like reaction, there is copper in most Phthalo pigments, but this has never happened in any of the other paints I own. Even in the same palette container, no other colors I own have this speckled white affliction.

Typically most brands use the same formula in their pans as their tubes. Thus creating products that customers can freely decide how to use - such as deciding to squeeze out a little tube paint into a travel palette for use from dry. This is the economical way to buy watercolors in the long run. The tubes are more of an investment up front, but typically go a long way. For instance I can get a roughly 3ml full pan for just under the cost of a 14ml tube. Even considering shrinkage from drying, you can typically fill 3 full pans from a single tube. Other artists have told me that their tube filled pans have over time cracked and become hard to re-wet, after repeatedly being wet and dried over painting sessions. Again, this is not something I have experienced in other brands. If that's a concern for you, Mission Gold may be the easiest to re-wet paints I own, fresh as the day I poured them even over 5 years and dozens of uses later.

Aqua Green is a phthalo based color called "Palomar Turquoise" created for the automotive industry. Because it is not widely available as an artists pigment, no pigment code has yet been assigned to it. To be clear about what it contains, Winsor & Newton's labels do say "Ingredient: Phthalo". Unlike most Phthalo colors in other brands, this version has a nice subtle granulation. Fun fact - Phthalos have a natural tendency to granulate, but typically manufacturing efforts are made to smooth them out including grinding the particles very small. This version likely granulates because the automotive paint manufacturer did not create this pigment with thin applications like watercolor painting in mind.

Misleading names: Smalt and Cadmium Orange are not the pigments their names imply. I was frustrated to find out that Smalt lacked the word "hue" on the label. Smalt genuine (PB32) is a toxic ingredient common in historical paintings. W&N's version is actually a version of Ultramarine Purple (PV15), a blue-shade fairly close to regular Ultramarine Blue. Cadmium Orange also does not say hue, but is actually Cadmium Red and Yellow mixed. Technically it's still Cadmium based, and I assume that may be a reason they don't consider it a Cadmium hue/look-a-like, though it's still misleading. I had assumed that Cadmium Orange would be pure PO20, since they plainly do have that ingredient since it's mixed into one of their yellows. There are also colors with names like "Winsor Yellow" that force you to look at the pigment ingredient for clarification.

Regarding the great "CADMIUM-FREE" marketing disaster, frustrating artists worldwide: You may notice a handful of colors without pigment information - the CADMIUM-FREE line. These colors mimic genuine Cadmium colors, though it's not really clear why they aren't just labeled "hue" (AKA the standard wording for a look-a-like). I found that they dried slightly less opaque than their genuine counterparts, felt a bit less thick and creamy, but that the color was overall very similar. Since no pigment ingredient is given for them, you can't really be sure that they are a totally lightfast or non-toxic alternative to regular Cadmium. It's very unclear if these paints are just mixtures, such as a similar looking red with some chalk filler to help it be more opaque (or even ground to a thicker particle size) like gouache.

You won't have to look far online to find a slew of reviews questioning the secrecy behind these paints. While it's possible that they wanted to keep the formula a trade secret, or that their chemists truly came up with something new that just doesn't have a pigment code assigned to it yet... the problem is the vague marketing and lack of clarity provided by the company. Along with the fact that these cadmium-free colors are priced just as high as their genuine cadmium counterparts, without us knowing if they are just charging us a premium for a generic "hue" or being certain the ingredients are lightfast or safe. Considering a huge part of what sets pro grade paint apart from lower cost brands, is reputable lightfast ratings with a full disclosure of pigment ingredients, this hurts the company's image. I would have respected it more had they been transparent about it, even if it was just a note of "ingredients: trade secret mixture" on the tube.

Sadly the lightfast test result proves that we should be suspicious when there are no pigment ingredients listed. Cadmium FREE orange is fugitive. It appears they mixed a fugitive red with a lightfast yellow, and at the end of one year only the yellow part of this color remains. This is not an acceptable Cadmium Orange alternative, as PO20 or the mixture of PY35/PR108 are far superior in lightfastness.

Swatch Card Color Chart for all 109 Winsor and Newton professional watercolors (click any image for purchase options):

Want to see how each color compares to the same pigment in another brand? Check out the color you want to compare on the pigment database pages.

Where to buy? I bought the full range dot card, sets or individual tubes and pans from the following online stores. As an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.