How We Make Our Finest Professional Watercolours
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.
French Ultramarine Pigment Details
📖 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.
🌱 Vegetable Glycerin for Flexibility and Flow
Our vegetable glycerin, derived from rapeseed oil, acts as a humectant and plasticizer, helping the paint remain flexible, preventing brittleness, and ensuring easy rewetting. Learn more about the use of glycerin in our watercolours .
- 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.
🔍 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 Hegman Gauge Test
🖌️ 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.