Art Materials Singapore

4 August 2026 · 4 min read

Quick answer: buy paint, a surface and three brushes, in that order of importance. The difference between student grade and artist grade is pigment concentration, and you can see it — but student grade from a decent brand is the right place to start and will not be the reason a painting does not work.

This is the guide to what the grades actually mean, so you can spend deliberately rather than by price.

Paint

Which kind

Acrylic is the right first paint for nearly everyone. It dries in about twenty minutes, dries permanently, and can be painted over indefinitely — so a mistake becomes an underlayer rather than a disaster. It is also what almost every group session uses.

Watercolour is cheaper to start and much harder. A mark is permanent and cannot be covered, which is the opposite of forgiving.

Oil stays wet for days, needs solvents, and is not a first purchase unless you specifically want it.

Student versus artist grade

The difference is pigment load. Artist grade carries more pigment and less filler, so colours are stronger, cover better and shift less as they dry. Student grade is chalkier, weaker and needs more coats.

Both are usable. The gap only really shows at the extremes — deep colours and clean whites. Start with student grade from a known brand rather than artist grade from an unknown one; the brand is doing more work than the label.

What to avoid is the unbranded value set. It is thin enough that you use twice as much, and its whites are grey.

How much

Six to eight colours plus a separate larger tube of white. White runs out first, every time, because it goes into almost every mix.

Resist the forty-colour set. More colours means more mixing, and more mixing means brown. Three good colours plus white will produce more usable variety than thirty mediocre ones.

Surfaces

Stretched canvas is the default: cotton over a wooden frame, pre-primed, ready to hang. 30x40cm is a comfortable first size — big enough to feel like a painting, small enough to finish in a session.

Canvas boards are canvas glued to card. Cheaper, thinner, fine for practice, less satisfying to keep.

Paper works for acrylic if it is heavy enough. Anything under about 200gsm will buckle.

The thing to check is priming. Unprimed cotton drinks the first coat and it vanishes. Cheap canvas is usually cheap because it is thinly primed and loose on the frame — both visible once you start painting, neither visible in a photograph, which is why canvas is the worst thing to buy online first time.

Brushes

Three, differing in size: a wide flat, a medium round, a small round. That genuinely covers everything a beginner will do, and it beats a twelve-brush set that is ten variations of the same thing.

Synthetic bristles are correct for acrylic. Natural hair is for oils and watercolour and does not survive acrylic well.

Brush quality matters less than paint quality at this stage, with one exception: a cheap brush that sheds bristles into wet paint is genuinely irritating. Mid-range synthetic is the sweet spot.

The rule that matters more than the purchase is washing them straight away. Acrylic dries in the bristles and does not come out — a brush left in a pot for an hour is finished, and that is how most sets die.

The rest

• Palette. A paper plate works. A tear-off palette pad is a small, real convenience.
• Two water pots. One to rinse, one clean. Grey water makes grey colours.
• Table protection. Non-negotiable. Dry acrylic does not come off wood.
• Old clothes. Not an apron, old clothes. It does not come out of fabric either.
• Mediums and additives. Later, once you have a specific problem to solve.

What you actually need covers the same ground as a shopping list rather than an explanation.

Buying for a group

Paint shares well — one set between three or four painters is ample, since nobody uses a whole tube in a session. Brushes do not, because everyone wants one at the same time.

So buy paint in fewer, larger quantities, brushes one set each, a canvas each, and more table covering than you think. Put whatever you save on the disposables into better paint.

Before you commit to any of it

Materials are worth owning once you know you will keep painting. That is a much easier thing to know after a session than before one — and in a session everything is already laid out, with nothing to buy or bring.

How a session runs covers what is included. If what you actually want is to work out which medium suits you, the different types of art worth trying is the more useful place to start than a shopping trip.