Modern Art Gallery - Five Tips of Water Color Painting

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Modern Art Gallery - Five Tips of Water Color Painting

by Preeti Garg

in Art / Painting (submitted 2013-05-30)

From a scientific point of view, knowledge to use watercolor is simple: add water to the paint, put brush on paper, and you're painting. It's the beginning of an exciting and interesting artistic journey. These 5 watercolor painting tips will help you keep away from basic mistakes and get better results right from the start.

1. With watercolor paint, a color will always look stronger when it is wet. A color will always be lighter and paler when dry. It's something you get a feel for through do and experience. If your paintings look insipid, make the colors more intense by using more paint and less water, or painting another layer of a color over the first. Watercolor paint dries very speedy, so test a color on a scrap of paper or on the border of your painting before using it. That way you'll know whether it's the shade and/or tone you're after.

2. Even once watercolor paint has dried, it remains water soluble. You can re-wet the dried paint with water on a brush and it will 'turn' back into paint. This means you can lift the paint off the paper to fix a mistake, lighten a color by removing some of it, or even mix it with new paint. While you do need to be careful you don't scrub at the paper too much and harm the surface. Watercolor paint is translucent. You can see from side to side the layers of color you've painted, making it near unfeasible to conceal mistakes. Don't fight against this, but embrace it and work with it.

3. Because the white in watercolor comes from the white of the paper, not the paint itself, the usual advice is to paint from light to dark. To start with the lightest colors and tones, and build your way up to the darkest. But don't be fearful to experiment with putting down dark colors early on in a watercolor painting, as it may turn out to be an approach that works for you!

4. Rather have just one, good brush than a handful of cheap ones that splay out and drop hairs. It'll save you a lot of irritation. A good brush retains its shape so you can get a very fine brush mark from the point; it holds a good quantity of paint so you need to reload it less often.

5. Avoid involuntarily adding more water to your paint after you've washed your brush by dabbing the brush onto a dry cloth before putting it in the paint again. If you've loaded a brush with paint and decide you needed less paint, hold clean cloth at ferrule end of the brush hairs to soak up some of the excess. Doing it at this end helps keep the color at the tip of the brush.