Canadian Art Supplies and Canadian made paints

Wondering where to buy Canadian Made art supplies?  Here are some ideas.

For those of you in the future, I am writing this on the 4th of March, 2025.  And I hope so much that this a date that has zero meaning to future readers as nothing long lasting happened here.  I hope.

For those of you in the present day, I want to share some of my favourite Canadian art supplies.  

Watercolours:

Beam Paints handmade watercolours

(my review)

They have the whole affirmative action, First Nations owned, female lead, eco-friendly, etc stuff if that's your cuppa tea.  They are also handmade in Ontario.  

What really matters is they make the best watercolour paints I've ever tried.  

HannahLouMyers handmade watercolour paint 

(my review)

Handmade watercolours made in or near Vancouver, BC, these are amazing paints to work with.  The dot cards are generous and an excellent place to start if you are new to handmade watercolours.

Oil Paints

Kama Pigments Oil Paints

I haven't bought from these yet, so I don't know how good they are.  I'm hoping to save up and put in an order this summer.

The big advantages seem to be Canadian Made (Quebec?), handmade/hand processed, and a long history of making and selling paints for almost thirty years.  They are also exceptionally affordable for professional grade paints - which my research suggests they are.

They are made with walnut oil which makes them a likely substitute for my current favourite paint M. Graham (made in Oregon, alas).

The things that hold me back from buying these right away is the lack of lightfastness information and lack of reviews in English (and google not willing to share french language sites with me despite having a translation option).  If you do try these, please let me know how it goes.

Other

I want to give a shout out for some locally owned art supply shops on the Left Coast.  They often carry Canadian made art supplies.

Opus Art Supplies

Monks Office also has a lot of fine art supplies worth checking out.

And for my lovely friends south of the 49th, I highly recommend American made M Graham for both watercolours and oils.  Take care and remember, this little trade tiff between politicians won't damage our friendship.  But it is kind of a neat excuse to get to know what's available locally which, in the end, is pretty cool.  

(no affiliate links here, alas, I just like this stuff)

Fig in charcoal

 Practicing chicken drawing.  Today in charcoal.  

Beam Paints - handmade watercolour paints review

Here's a little review I posted elsewhere. 

This review is for: Beam Paints

I give this paint 10 out of 10 acorns.

Because it's not only lovely to work with, but matches well with permaculture values.  

Where to begin sharing how much I love these handmade watercolour paints?

That they are handmade is a good start.  That these are made using local (to them) ingredients whenever possible and with the pride of someone who loves what they do - the people who make these paints obviously put a lot of love and care into what they do.  We can see this with the packaging.

And the extent they go to to keep plastic away from the paints.  Beeswax soaked cloth wrap each paint-stone (their word for 'half pan' or the equivalent of 5ml of fresh paint) and a little label shares the information about each colour.

The colours!  

This is just the sample I got so far.  They have a lot of colours to choose from.   At the time of making that chart, only burnt sienna hadn't got a lightfastness rating back from the lab.  All the others rate excellent (which I think is astm 1 and 2)

I want to complain a bit because the colours!  They are so strong compared to mass manufactured watercolour paint, it takes so much getting used to.  It's been the most difficult part of learning to use these paints.  Their Mix Six are especially vibrent.

That said, some of their earth colours, like the burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and white here, tend to be a bit tough to activate if we haven't painted with them for a while.  They like to have a bit of water on them the day before painting to wake up.  

Each colour has a different personality.  Unlike massmanufactured paints, where there are efforts to keep the paint fairly consistant, Beam Paints scream individuality.  One can feel the minerals and pigments participating in the painting and I think most people who are used to watercolours stumble at this point.  They are used to paints that are mild, along for the ride.  Beam Paints aren't like that.  They want to help make the best painting ever, if we let them.

So I do what I always do with new paints - a limited palette study.

These paints are:

Mars Red

Timberwolf

Fall Poplar Yellow

Boreal Green

(later on, I use a touch of limestone white - oh, it looks like this is changing the name to trillium white)

Can it paint a chicken?

Can you see some of the personality of the paints?  The granulation of the sky and the way the blue paint fades to red (no red added).  Some of the paints lift and change, some are more opaque than most watercolour is used to.  There's a lot of learning to do here.  It's not my best chicken ever.

The same colours, but a bit of white.  Each painting is just under 3" on the long side.

Beam Paints also sells lovely wooden palettes from reclaimed wood from local sustainable forestry practices or something.  I suspect maple syrup is involved, but I have this sweet delusion that all trees in Ontario, Canada are for making maple syrup.  (they are, right?)

But, you know, spending money on a bit of wood takes money away from paint.  So I asked a family member to make me something from the old apple tree branch that blew down a few years back.

I love it!  

The next limited palette I try is a variation on the Zorn palette (I say zorn because it's easier to spell than ... asks duckduckgo how to spell it... apelles)

I'm using

Turtle Belly (red)

Harvest Wheat (yellow ochre)

Mars Black

The white is from the white of the paper.

But can IT paint a chicken?

pretty  

I had a lot of practice with this one doing a Holiday Advent calendar kind of painting thing.  I added the sparkly blue colour Winter Nights for some of the paintings, but tried to keep it just those three paints as much as possible.

More recently I've been trying to get used to the more vibrant colours of their staple palette and how they work with my current favourites.  It's tricky with how bright these colours are compared to commercial paints.  But I feel I can get there with enough chickens.

On the whole, these are awesome paints if one's painting style can give them freedom to be themselves.  They are a bit colourful for an absolute beginner, but then again, that might be just what one needs to learn to paint.  

Depending on the colour, the paint stones last almost double the length of time it takes me to use up a halfpan of mass -manufactured paint like Winsor and Newton.  With shipping and the way the world works, Beam Paints cost about the same or less as the mid brands like Winsor and Newton locally, so it ends up being excellent value for my dollar.  

I would highly recommend these paints for anyone who cares about their crafting footprint, who, like me lives in Canada where art supplies imported from other countries are way over priced, or people who like pretty colours.  

Beam Paints handmade watercolours