Domestic orders - $9 for economy and $12 for expedited shipping for all orders under $150. We offer free shipping for any orders over $150. 

All international orders - DHL shipping costs, duties and import taxes will be displayed at checkout. Shipping charges range depending on your country, usually from $20-$40. However, there may be additional charges at the time the order is processed for additional shipping depending on package size, contents, and destination—we try our best to minimize these but sometimes it is out of our control!

Yes, we sure do! We are currently shipping all international orders with DHL as we have found their service to be the quickest, safest, and most reliable. Right now our international shipping rate ranges between $20-$40 at checkout, however there may be additional shipping charges at the time your order is processed for shipping. If this is the case, we will reach out to you directly and invoice you for any additional charges. All duties charges are also displayed at checkout.

We also have the option to ship with USPS International. If you would prefer this service, please let us know and reach out to us directly at info@caseformaking.com once you have placed your order, or please add this request to your order notes.

All domestic orders are shipped with either USPS Priority Mail, USPS Ground Advantage or UPS Ground and should take 2-5 business days to arrive once shipped. 

All international orders are shipped with DHL and usually take 6-10 business days to arrive once shipped.

Our domestic packages are shipped via USPS Priority Mail or Ground Advantage and will arrive within 2-5 days once shipped based on delivery location.

If you have any questions and/or are worried about a time constraint for gifts or workshop supplies please email us as soon as you place your order with as many details as you can provide and we will do our best to accommodate your request. However, we cannot always guarantee delivery within certain time frames and any expedited or UPS shipments will incure additional costs.

We ship all orders in the order they are received. We do our best to ship orders out within a week of them being placed. If it has been over a week and you have not received a shipping notification, please reach out to us and we’ll help you look into it! 

Please note that we ship orders during the week Monday through Friday. If an order is placed over the weekend, it will be processed for shipping during the next few business days.

No worries, it happens! Please reach out to us directly at info@caseformaking.com with as many details as you can provide (Name, Order Number, & Preferred Shipping Address). 

If shipping rates apply, we will invoice you for the cost of shipping and will ship the order as soon as the invoice is paid.

Please check the tracking information you should have received through a shipping confirmation email when your order was shipped. If you can’t find the email or feel it might not have been sent, please email us at info@caseformaking.com and we can help look into it!

If your tracking information says … 

That it has been delivered, but you have not received the package - Please submit a missing mail and lost package form on the USPS website. We also recommend checking in with your household, mailperson, and neighbors, just in case! If you are unable to resolve the issue with USPS directly, please reach out to us at info@caseformaking.com and we’ll do our best to help.

That the package is “In-Transit” or “Arriving Late” - hang tight! The package is not missing, just taking its time! We see this happen every so often and 99% of the time, the package shows up! If you would like to inquire more information, we recommend reaching out to your local post office and giving them a nudge, this usually helps!

Please understand that package delivery is out of our control once it has left our facility. We will do our best to help and make it right if something has happened, but please contact your local USPS directly if you think a package is lost, missing or stolen. We only have as much information as what is provided in your tracking link. 

Oh no!!! We want to make it right! Please reach out to us directly at info@caseformaking.com with as many details as possible, so we can help. We always do our best to try and prevent these situations from happening, but unfortunately, sometimes it’s just inevitable! Thank you for your patience as we work through making this right.

Please contact us directly at info@caseformaking.com as soon as you realize the error! If we haven’t already shipped your order we can adjust the address or contact information no problem!

If the order has already been shipped out, please let us know as soon as possible. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to change the address in time, as it may already be with the mail carrier. If this is the case, we’ll work with you to find a solution and make sure the order is eventually delivered to the correct address.

Email us ASAP! Please reach out to us directly  at info@caseformaking.com. We will do our best to make any necessary changes to your order as long as it has not been shipped yet!

Yes! As long as your orders have not yet shipped. Please reach out to us directly at info@caseformaking.com with as many details as possible and we’ll do our best to accommodate your request. If you were overcharged for shipping because of this, we will refund you accordingly.

We are happy to help within 30 days of receiving your order. Please email us directly at info@caseformaking.com with any questions or concerns and as many details as possible. If you would like to exchange or return your purchase, the customer is responsible for covering all additional charges and any shipping costs.

Yes! We are happy to help within 30 days of receiving your order. 

Unfortunately, at this time, we do not offer store credit as an option for returns. If eligible, we will offer a refund for the returned merchandise.

Yes! Please! If you are purchasing a gift, please add to the order notes any gift note that you would like to include. We will hand write the note and include it in the order. This also helps the recipient to know who the gift is from! Thanks for thinking of us when gift shopping!

We do not officially offer gift wrap options, however we thoughtfully wrap all of our products in tissue paper fastened with our signature gold tape because all mail should feel like a gift! 

Contents are not visible upon unboxing and we never include prices on our products or packing slips in orders, so you don’t have to worry about the recipient seeing prices.

We are happy to help within 30 days of receiving your order. Please email us directly at info@caseformaking.com with any questions or concerns and as many details as possible.

If you see a product on our website that is sold out, we will most likely have it back in stock within a month. If you would like to inquire about a specific product and estimated restock times, please email us at info@caseformaking.com and we’ll do our best to help! 

If you see a watercolor in our Core Collection that is currently sold out, but still live on the website, don't worry! We’re always making more and the color will be made available again! It is rare that a color is retired from our collection. If the watercolor you are looking for has been removed from the website, this is a sign that this color is most likely discontinued or no longer available to purchase and will not be restocked. 

On any sold out product page, you can request a notification to receive an email when the item is back in stock.

Unfortunately, at this time, we do not offer product waitlists or the option to pre-order an item. Please sign up for our mailing list and newsletter to be notified when we launch new products or have any special announcements.

Thanks for noticing! We love our colors, which are all handmade in our shop by an amazing group of women using the highest quality materials we can find. Each color we bring in has been carefully selected and tested by us so that we can confidently and proudly offer it to you! It’s always so exciting to discover a new color that inspires us!  

We make a point to use a ton of pigment with just enough of our natural watercolor medium to create the richest, most opaque and long-lasting color we can. Our medium is composed of gum arabic (sap from the acacia tree), glycerine, honey, and distilled water. Combining just pigment with these natural ingredients also allows for the individual characteristics of each pigment to really shine through! For example, our Blue Ridge Hematite colors are smooth and very opaque, while our Pink Pipestone has a unique gritty texture that remains even after our mulling process!

Every one of our colors are composed of pigment mixed with watercolor binding medium, which is distilled water, glycerine, honey, and gum arabic (sap from the acacia tree). 

The pigments we work with range from natural earth and mineral pigments to synthetic and metallic ones. (You can see a breakdown of earths vs. synthetic colors on our Watercolors product page under the Pigment Type category.)

In an effort to stay away from toxic paints, we’ve chosen not to offer any cobalts, chromiums, or cadmiums and do not produce colors containing lead, mercury, or other harmful materials. If there is anything in any of our colors that might be harmful in any way we will note this in bold at the bottom of the color description! 

All of that said, we would also like to make clear that our colors are artist-grade, are not intended for use by children, and should only be used for the purpose of watercolor painting. 

It’s always a good idea to keep food and beverages away from your painting area and to wash your hands after use.

Our colors come in the standard half-pan size, which measures 1.9cm x 1.6cm x .9cm. We only sell this size because we have found that our paints are so pigment-rich that a little really does go a long way! Also, with this smaller size you can fit more colors into your palette!

Most of the colors in our core collection are lightfast. Our fluorescents, Carmine Naccarat and Indigo, Rouge Vermilion are not lightfast—and this is noted in their individual color descriptions. Carmine Naccarat is not lightfast because the pigment has been made from the natural dye cochineal, which is a fugitive dye itself. (Fugitive means that you can’t trust it to stay put—it will fade over time!) 

We’ve created a breakdown of which colors are lightfast and which are not on our Watercolors product page under Pigment Characteristics, where colors are grouped by lightfastness as well as their different opacities, transparencies, and textures.

We source our pigments from various manufacturers and distributors, and we also pick up colors on our travel adventures! One of our main distributors and collaborators—and where Alexis, Case for Making’s owner, learned to make paint—is Kremer Pigment in New York. They’re a great resource for pigment and everything related to making your own art materials. We recommend checking them out! Tell them we sent you!!

We’ve selected and continue to choose colors that completely inspire us and offer something special—anything from richness to texture—that keeps us wanting more. We aim to offer a wide range of colors that are unique but also complement each other and can work together to build a useful, cohesive palette. This is how we’ve come to determine our Core Collection. These are the 60 we can’t live without! They offer a good range of different types of pigment, with some unexpected additions alongside traditional and time-tested colors. Our aim is to have almost all of our 60 Core colors stocked online as consistently as possible and then rotate some limited edition colors through our offerings as well.

All paint is made from pigment and a binder. It sounds simple, but this is something that was never taught in all the various art classes we’ve taken collectively over the years! Pigment inherently needs to be insoluble—we like to think of it like tiny grains of sand you’d find on a beach—so you want the pigment’s particle size to be as small as possible. The pigment particles will then be mixed with and suspended in a binder.

The binder that you use determines the type of paint you ultimately make: for oil paint the binder is usually linseed oil (or it could also be another type of drying oil like poppyseed or walnut), for acrylic paint it is plastic polymers, and for watercolors it is gum arabic. This is one of the reasons we love watercolors so much, because this binder (aka acacia tree sap) feels like the most delicate way to hold all the little pigment particles together!

So, on a glass or marble slab we combine just the right amount of binder with the dry pigment and begin to mix it together. Every different pigment needs a different amount of binder, and this is the hard part about making paint—there is no exact ratio! It just takes a lot of patience and practice to learn each color’s preference. After the pigment and binder are mixed we go through 3-4 thorough rounds of mulling. A muller is usually made of glass and has a round handle above a smooth, perfectly flat bottom which is used to smooth the paint in a circular motion over the flat, glass surface. This process shears each of the individual pigment particles away from each other, resulting in smooth and luscious paint! After the paint has been properly mulled—again, each color needs a different amount—the paint is scooped into our little half pans and set in a tray to dry. This can take anywhere from 4-7 days depending on the color and the weather!

If you live in the Bay Area or are planning a visit please check out our workshops—you can join us for a paint making class where you work together to make a full set of paints!

 This totally depends on the characteristics of the actual pigments we use! The colors we have that are gritty come from natural materials that, due to their chemical properties, are harder and result in a larger particle size. These colors are: Pink Pipestone, Slate Grey, Raw Sienna, Vagone Green, Nicosia, Malachite, Lapis Lazuli, Azurite and Vivianite. In watercolors this is also often called granulation.

This is also due to where we buy our pigments, what they are made out of and what it takes to make them! Our most expensive paints are Malachite and Lapis Lazuli because they are made from the actual crushed mineral!

Our CfM Small Palette is our best seller for sure—it fits up to 14 half pans and has room in the center for a small travel brush! Our favorite palette is the CfM Simple Travel Palette—it is so sleek and small and it fits in your purse or pocket!

Our Small, Medium, Large and X-Large palettes are made by a manufacturer in Germany and are made from pressed aluminum. The Simple Travel and Canteen Travel Palettes are made from a sturdier enameled metal and are made in Italy.

Check out our How To section! We have a how to video for this!

The Simple Travel and Canteen Travel Palettes come with two metal spacer bars—load your half pans into any of the rows and press one bar into the space between the bottom of the half pans and the top edge of the middle row. Do the same thing for the bottom row but press the metal spacer bar along the top edge of the half pans and the bottom edge of the middle row!

For the rest of our palettes, orient your half pans in the tall or portrait orientation and press them into the metal backing and click them down into the tray. If you put the half pans in the long way or in landscape orientation the metal teeth won't be able to clip them down and they'll fall out!

The opening for the canteen is quite small, the trick is to fill it with just a trickle of water and to keep the palette tilted as you do so. Air has to be able to escape as the water is going in and vice versa as it is pouring out!

This is one of our favorite questions, so we’re prepared! To keep yourself from getting overwhelmed, we think it’s smart to start with:

a brush -  You only need one! A round size 8 is the best starter brush because you get the most stroke variation

1 - 3 watercolors - We recommend starting with at least one of every primary color (one red, one blue, one yellow - any will do), or just pick 3 colors that make you feel the most excited! Practice mixing these colors together and discover how much you can create with just three colors!  – If you want to start with just one color, we recommend Indigo. It’s so rich because it offers a vast spectrum of shades!

Watercolor Paper - Any watercolor paper will work! Start with something inexpensive and paint your heart out! We recommend the Strathmore Vision paper pads. 

In some ways, color can feel very intimidating and abstract. This is a large reason why Alexis, the founder of Case for Making, began her research into pigment. She’d read a fair amount about color theory and even taken college classes on the subject and still had a lot of questions about color: How to work with it, which colors to choose, where did all the paint names come from and why? What made professors ask for certain colors over others—again and again—on materials lists for classes? After stumbling upon some pure pigment in an art store in Berlin, Germany, she saw color as a material for the first time. Seeing bins and buckets of powdered color made her realize that she wanted to know where all the pigments came from and what they were made out of! 

Over the course of her research, Alexis has made more than 200 different colors from pure pigment and has found over and over that each one has its own unique way of mixing with the medium, mulling on the slab, getting into the pans, and then (of course) painting! Each one has its own personality and we like to get to know them and let each one do its thing—we think about painting with each of these colors in the same way! We recommend starting slow, getting to know what a color likes to do on the page, and building an understanding of each one as a material with its own unique properties.

Don’t overthink it, just start by making marks! Write yourself notes about what you’re doing so you can look back after things dry—it changes so much when it dries! We like to think about painting as an experiment!!

We make our paper products to challenge our own ideas about how to approach a painting. Sometimes a perfect surface feels so intimidating! Our letterpress printed watercolor paper is open for interpretation—there really is no right way to use it and we want you to get weird with it!

Always! Here are a few ideas to get you going: 

repeated pattern studies on the grid paper, mini landscapes, storyboarding, color swatching! On the circle paper, we’ve seen beautiful florals and monogram lettering as well as birthday cards! The dot grid is our newest addition and is meant to challenge the idea of what a paintable surface might be! We see this as an opportunity to add texture to any painting you might make! Check out how people have been using our paper products on instagram with the hashtags #caseformakingpaper #watercolorgridpaper #watercolordotgrid 
#watercolorcirclepaper

We do! We actually built a whole platform for it! You can click on the WORKSHOPS button in our menu bar to check out our current list of classes that we teach on Zoom. They're a lot of fun and we love meeting people and painting together!

We're working on adding these back into our monthly schedule! Due to limited space in our own shop we're looking for alternate venues to host a few in-person workshops a month.

Yes! All of our workshops are great for beginners but they are not only for beginners—we encourage everyone to come!

Currently we offer 2-4 workshops a week and you can find them by clicking in our 'workshop' section of this website.  We list workshops on the third Friday of the month for the next month's lineup—spots can go pretty fast so make sure you're on our mailing list so you receive notification when they're up online! Once your online purchase is complete your name will be added to our guest list and you'll receive the Zoom link the day before as well as 15 minutes before the session. We look forward to making with you soon!

All workshops are recorded and the replay will be automatically available the day after class to everyone who paid for a spot! The link to the recording will expire 30 days after the date of the session.

Please note that everyone will receive the recording, so there is no need to cancel if you aren't able to attend live!

If you would still like to cancel your spot, please email friends@caseformaking.com no later than 48 hours before your session. Refunds cannot be issued less than 48 hours in advance.

Sorry, we don't do class swaps!

Links are emailed 24 hours before the workshop, as well as 15 minutes before the class starts! If you haven’t received the link by the morning of your session, please reach out and let us know. Please check your spam folder as well, as sometimes emails from us get sorted incorrectly!

Zoom links are sent to the email address used to register for class 24 hours before the workshop begins. If you don't see the Zoom link the morning that class is supposed to start, please check your spam folder or Gmail promotions folder first! If you still don't see it, email us at both friends@caseformaking.com and info@caseformaking.com and someone will send you the link asap!

We do our best to consistently list next month’s classes on the third Friday of each month at 12pm PST!

You’re welcome to head to our Workshops page—just scroll down to sign yourself up to receive a preview of the workshop lineup the day before classes go live on the site as well as an email when sessions are live!

We offer 2 scholarship spots for people with financial need! Send an email to friends@caseformaking.com with any and all financial need requests.

Please reach out via our contact form or email friends@caseformaking.com!