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once you have bought the equipment, and Corel Painter which seems like spending more than a box of good quality watercolours and heaps of paper.

lol

Obviously you haven't bought artists watercolours or paper recently. Yes you can buy the crappy kids stuff but your work will look like it.

I assume you are joking!

I have the highest quality water colours, (principally Windsor and Newton Artist quality Watercolours, and Schminke and La Aquarelle by Sennelier which are great too)

And tons of Arches Aquarelle Blocks, and they weren't cheap.
Fontanelle is good stuff and is a lot less expensive, still not cheap
I do just buy all the time, if I had done the same things with cryptos I would be rich in money, instead of pigments.
But Corel Painter is 700 euros. I recently considered buying it.
(Decided on Krita instead, open source.)
And a computer to run it on is at least that much.
Obviously could easily be a lot more too.

Hell, just a good graphics tablet by itself would set anyone up as a water colourist for months or more.

Nice collection.

Actually I forgot that watercolours tend to go a lot further than oil paints. Also I tend to really use thick paint (oil) or multiple thin layers (or I did when I used to use it).

That is not necessary for watercolour.

700 Euros for Corel Painter is excessive! It was only 250 pounds when I bought it and since then I just pay about 100 -150 for upgrades! In that case you could do a lot of painting for the price.

That said painting supplies in England are like many "physical" things a rip off. Last time I went to buy oil paints I ended up spending £300 including canvases. As for the tablet I had it anyway for Photoshop so I didn't really think of it as a cost but yes you are talking a few hundred pounds/euros for that.

Thing is once you have it, it will last a long time and you don't even really need to upgrade - I'm just one of these people that has to get the latest version.

yes, if you already have the equipment, and the software, then it's good value.
I was shocked at the price of painter, and immediately started looking what the open source options were, and there are several that seemed good, but Krita wins hands down.
Unfortunately for me, I had an incident with my previous graphics tablet, in that I accidentally pushed the pen off the table and didn't realise, and one of the dogs chewed it up.
It was a fairly crappy Trust one anyway, but the UGEE that I have replaced it with is only half a man, or something.
Won't work with pressure in the gimp, until maybe the gimp 3.0 and in Krita I have had a hard time getting it to not be glitchy.
Apparently works fine in Ps and Painter, although I have my doubts.
(I don't use those programs anymore since I decided to stop using pirated wares, and there's no way I can buy them, or even rent the adobe creative cloud. 70 euros a month is just so ludicrous for me. That's half my dog food bill right there.)

In the end I am using it without pressure sensitivity and not really painting anything.
I have been making vector drawings in Inkscape and theoretically I still paint in watercolours, although as I noted somewhere else, I am not working since steemit came along.

thanks for replying

You can pay less for individual apps on Creative Cloud. I think it is (or was) 10 euros per app.

I am convinced by the open source world these days.

I love the idea and I love the generous communities based around them.
I doubt I'll go back

those Titan Bizancios are very nice too, those tubes down the front.
And there are tubes of watercolour there that I have been using for fifteen years.
good quality watercolours are very dense and go a loooong way.
depending what you do with them of course

Now Golden Acrylic paint, now there's a competitor. I spent 350 euros the last time I bought some acrylic paints.

But I am having to try and work out how to replace my computer right now, and it's a lot more than that.

Later I agree that the way one can derive works from works in the digital realm makes it impossible to ignore, and believe me I don't.

anyhow, I am afraid I stand with my original point, it is far cheaper to start painting traditionally than digitally.
later the unit cost is much less, or even zero, but the same is true for me.
Even if I never shop for materials again, I won't have to stop painting in the time I have left on this planet.
(barring the case of a catastrophic loss of my house and studio, but that goes for the digital world, and with a hard drive failure or similar is far more likely.)

and of course, with the fact that I now spend all my time on Steemit, I don't use up any materials at all