How We Make Our Finest Professional Watercolours

At Jackman’s Art Materials, we pride ourselves on crafting the highest-quality professional watercolours. Each batch is made by hand in the UK using carefully selected ingredients and traditional methods. The result? Exceptional colour strength, rewetting ability, and performance that artists trust.

🌍 Global Pigment Sourcing

We collaborate with trusted suppliers worldwide to source artist-grade pigments that meet our standards for ethics, quality, and consistency.

Close-up of French Ultramarine Blue pigment agglomerates used in handmade professional watercolours by Jackman’s Art Materials.

📖 Learn more about our pigments on the Jackman’s Pigment Blog

💧 Distilled Water & Kordofan Gum Arabic

We dissolve hand-selected Sudanese Kordofan Gum Arabic lumps in distilled water produced on-site. This slow, careful process—often taking weeks—ensures the final binder is crystal clear and free from impurities. We then add vegetable glycerin and a preservative for optimal paint performance.

Why Distilled Water?

Tap water contains minerals such as calcium, iron, and magnesium, which may interfere with pigment chemistry. Distilling eliminates these, providing a stable base for our handmade watercolour paint.

Why Use Lumps Instead of Powdered Gum Arabic?

Gum Arabic lumps collected from the Acacia Senegal tree contain fewer impurities than powdered gum, which can result in a cloudy binder. We dissolve and filter the lumps to produce a pure, clean gum solution.

Handpicked Sudanese Kordofan Gum Arabic lumps, used as a natural binder in Jackman’s UK-made watercolour paints.

🌱 Vegetable Glycerin for Flexibility and Flow

Our vegetable glycerin is sustainably derived from rapeseed oil. It functions as both a humectant and plasticizer, helping paint remain flexible, preventing brittleness, and ensuring it rewets easily with a damp brush.

Balanced Formulation: Too much glycerin causes stickiness; too little leads to cracking. We strike the perfect balance for a smooth, responsive finish.

⚙️ High-Speed Mixing

We start by manually wetting out the pigment, followed by high-speed mechanical mixing. This ensures even dispersion in the gum Arabic base and forms the foundation of our artist-grade handmade paints.

Pigment Dispersion Using a Triple Roll Mill

To further refine the paint, we pass it through a Triple Roll Mill with ceramic rollers, which prevents chemical interactions with reactive pigments. This process guarantees the silky, professional texture of our paints.

How a Triple Roll Mill Works:

Feed and Centre Rollers: Break down any remaining pigment agglomerates.
Apron Roller: Collects the fine dispersion and transfers it to a blade for further processing.

Triple Roll Mill with ceramic rollers used for fine pigment dispersion in professional-grade watercolour paint production.

🔍 Quality Control

Every batch of our UK-made professional watercolours undergoes rigorous testing for consistency and performance:

Fineness of Grind: Measured with a Hegman gauge to confirm optimal particle size.
Density: Checked against prior batches to ensure uniformity.
Swatching: Paint is tested on several types of watercolour paper to evaluate colour strength, flow, and transparency.

French Ultramarine Blue pigment tested on a Hegman Gauge to assess fineness of grind and consistency in handmade watercolours.

🖌️ Filling & Labelling

Each batch is weighed and filled with care—either by hand or with a precision machine depending on size. Our paints are then hand-labeled with in-house designs printed by professional UK printers, completing the journey from raw pigment to artist-ready product.

🎨 Watch Our Paints in Action

Take a behind-the-scenes look at our process with Marc Jackman, as we make custom watercolours for SAA Artist Alison C. Board. Filmed at SAA Studios.