Domestic orders - $9 for economy and $12 for expedited shipping for orders under $150. Orders over $150 receive free shipping!

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

Yes! For most international orders, we're currently shipping with DHL, as we've found their service to be the quickest and most reliable. We regret that as of December 2024, we're no longer able to ship to the EU due to increased costs related to the GPSR.

Right now our international shipping rate ranges between $20-$40 at checkout; however, there may be additional charges at the time your order is processed for shipping. If this is the case, we'll reach out to you directly and invoice you for any fees. All duty 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 add your 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.

Domestic packages are shipped via USPS Priority Mail or Ground Advantage, and will arrive within 2-5 days once shipped depending on the delivery location.

If you have questions or are worried about a time constraint for gifts or workshop supplies, please email us at info@caseformaking.com as soon as you place your order with as many details as you can provide. We will do our best to accommodate your request; however, we cannot always guarantee delivery within a certain time frame, and expedited or UPS shipments will incur additional costs.

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

Please note that we ship orders Monday through Friday. Orders placed over the weekend will be processed for shipping within 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, email address used at checkout, order number, and 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 received in your shipping confirmation email. If you can’t find the email or tracking, contact us at info@caseformaking.com and we can help look into it!

If your tracking information says:

Your order 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, mail carrier, and neighbors just in case! If you're 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.

Your 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 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 is provided in your tracking link.

Oh no!!! We want to make it right! Please email us at info@caseformaking.com with as many details as possible so we can help. We appreciate your patience as we work together to find the best fix!

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

If your order has already shipped, please let us know as soon as possible! We can't guarantee that we'll be able to update your details in time, as your package 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 at info@caseformaking.com. We'll do our best to make changes to your order as long as it has not yet shipped!

Yes, as long as your orders have not yet shipped! Please email us 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 accept returns on unused products within 30 days of your order receipt. Please email us at info@caseformaking.com with any questions or concerns and as many details as possible. For all returns and exchanges, the customer is responsible for additional charges and shipping costs.

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

Sorry, we don't offer store credit for returns at this time. We're happy to provide a refund for unused products within 30 days of purchase.

We are happy to help within 30 days of your gift receipt. Please email us at info@caseformaking.com with as many details as possible.

Yes! Please add your gift message to the order notes at checkout. We'll hand-write the note and include it in the order!

While we don't officially offer gift wrap options, we thoughtfully wrap all of our products in tissue paper fastened with our signature gold tape—because all mail should feel like a fun gift! 

We never include prices on our shipped products or packing slips in orders.

We try our best to restock sold out products within a month, but custom and imported products sometimes have longer lead times. For estimated restock times on specific products, please email us at info@caseformaking.com and we’ll do our best to help! You can also request a restock notification via the product listing on our site.

If a watercolor in our Core Collection is sold out but still listed, don't worry; we’re busy making more! If a watercolor is no longer listed, it's most likely discontinued and will not be restocked.

Sorry, we do not offer product waitlists or pre-order options at this time. We always announce new products and restocks in our newsletter, so we recommend signing up to stay in the know!

Yay, thanks for noticing! Our watercolors are all handmade, hand-wrapped and labeled in our San Francisco shop by our amazing team! We use the highest quality pigments we can find, plus our natural binding medium—and that's it! We make a point to use a ton of pigment with just enough medium to create the richest, most saturated watercolors possible, and this simple recipe allows for the individual characteristics of each pigment to really shine through!

Our watercolors are handmade in our shop using the highest quality earth and synthetic pigments, plus natural watercolor binding medium made from gum arabic (sap from acacia trees), honey, glycerine, distilled water, and a dash of clove oil for freshness!

In an effort to steer clear of 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. All of our watercolors, Indigo Ink, and Brush Buddy Soap conform to ASTM D-4236 safety standards.

Please be aware that our watercolors are professional/artist grade paints and are not intended for children. Pans are small and pose a choking hazard.

Our products should only be used as intended, 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. Do not use paints while smoking or eating, and do not sand any painted items without wearing a respirator. Our paints are also not intended for use on skin.

Our colors come in the standard half-pan size, which measures 1.9cm x 1.6cm x .9cm. We only sell this size because our paints are so pigment-rich, and 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, and Rouge Vermilion are not lightfast, along with some of our blends.

You can view a breakdown of lightfast and non-lightfast colors, as well as colors grouped by opacity, transparency, and texture, in our watercolor collection's Pigment Characteristics section.

We source our pigments from various manufacturers and distributors, and we also pick up colors on our travel adventures! One of our main collaborators is Kremer Pigment in New York, where our founder Alexis learned to make paint! Kremer is a great resource for pigment info, and everything else related to making your own art materials. We recommend checking them out!

We choose colors that 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 complement each other, and can work together in a useful, cohesive palette. This is how we’ve built our Core Collection: a carefully curated mix of traditional, time-tested, and unique colors we can’t live without!

All paint is made from pigment and a binder. It sounds simple, yet this process has rarely been taught in the various art classes we’ve collectively taken over the years! Pigment inherently needs to be insoluble (think of it like tiny grains of beach sand) and you want the particle size to be as small as possible. This allows the pigment to remain suspended in a binder.

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

To make our paints, we mix just the right amount of binder with dry pigment on a glass or marble slab. Every pigment requires a different amount of binder, and this is the hard part about making paint: there's 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, smoothing the paint in a circular motion with a flat-bottomed glass muller. This process shears the individual pigment particles away from each other, resulting in smooth and luscious paint!

This totally depends on the characteristics of the pigments we use! Our grittier colors—Pink Pipestone, Slate Green, Raw Sienna, Vagone Green, Nicosia, Malachite, Lapis Lazuli, and Azurite—come from natural materials whose chemical properties result in a larger pigment particle size. In watercolors, this is also called granulation.

There are many factors contributing to color cost, including where the pigments come from, what they are made out of and what it takes to mix them! Our most expensive paints are Malachite and Lapis Lazuli because they are made from the actual crushed minerals!

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! Another favorite is the CfM Simple Travel Palette; it's so sleek and small, it can fit in your purse or pocket!

Our CfM Small, Medium, Large and X-Large palettes are made in Germany from pressed aluminum. The Simple Travel and Canteen Travel Palettes are made from a sturdier enameled metal 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, so the trick is to fill it with just a trickle of water while keeping the palette tilted. Air has to be able to escape as the water is going in or 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

Yes, we offer online workshops via Zoom! Come join in the fun, meet people from different creative backgrounds, and explore art-making with us! Open to all levels of experience always.

Yes, we offer in-person workshops in our Art Room space at 4035 Judah St., next door to our San Francisco shop! Come join in the fun, meet people from different creative backgrounds, and explore art-making with us! Open to all levels of experience always.

Yes! Our online and in-person workshop pages have sign up links for our workshop-specific newsletters! Both receive a monthly preview the day before classes go live, and a notification when they are up online! Classes are posted on the third Friday of each month for the following month, at 12pm PT!

Absolutely! We emphasize process and experimentation, so our workshops are excellent for beginner and seasoned artists alike!

To cancel an in-person or online workshop, please email friends@caseformaking.com no later than 48 hours before your session. Refunds cannot be issued for cancellations within 48 hours of the session start time.

Online workshops are recorded, so there's no need to cancel if you aren't able to attend live!

Sorry, we don't do class swaps!

All online workshops are recorded, so you can view the session at your convenience if you can't make it live! Workshop recordings are sent automatically the day after class to everyone who paid for a spot, and are available for 30 days after the date of the workshop.

Zoom links are emailed 24 hours prior, and again 15 minutes prior, to the workshop start time. Please check out using the email address to which you’d like the link sent.

Zoom links are sent to the email address used at checkout when you purchased your class. If you have not received the link within 24 hours of your class, please check your spam folder or Gmail promotions folder first. If you still don't see it, email both friends@caseformaking.com and info@caseformaking.com and someone will send you the link asap!

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