Free Watercolor Article: Watercolor Tips

Tips For Working With Watercolor

Here are some tips based upon the most common problems beginners tend to have when attempting watercolor. These are from my observations over years of teaching and painting with watercolor. This article will most likely be updated for quite a while, so check back often!

Materials are much more important in watercolor than other mediums. This cannot be overstated. Other mediums are much more forgiving in purchasing supplies. Watercolor requires having top quality materials. The most important material is paper. Professional grade paper is mandatory if you want to paint with watercolor. Contrary to what many people think, it is actually impossible to paint correctly in watercolor on student grade paper. Paints and brushes are a bit more forgiving, but even these demand higher quality more than other mediums. The good news is that you actually need fewer materials for watercolor than other mediums. So, fewer materials, but of higher quality.

When learning watercolor, failure and multiple tries are the norm. Too many people think learning watercolor should be sort of like learning to cook: "If you follow the recipe, you will get pleasing results. They may not be perfect, but they will be pleasing enough." This is just not the case. Instead, learning watercolor should be thought of like learning a musical instrument: "You are going to start very simply. It will seem awkward, strange, and foreign. You won't be able to accomplish anything close to what the instructor does until you have practiced the same things many times." The good news is that, in my opinion, the practicing part of watercolor is much more enjoyable than, say, practicing scales on a guitar, and learning watercolor is quicker. This isn't meant to discourage anyone; quite the opposite. If you know what to expect going in, you will be much more likely to enjoy the practicing and learning and avoid the frustration of things not going like you expected.

Applying watercolor to the paper is usually a smooth, effortless process. You almost never scrub or push your brush into the paper. The brush should glide across the paper with almost no perceptible resistance. It is a gliding, smooth feeling.

You paint with colored water, not paint. In watercolor you almost never paint with pure paint or anything near pure paint. It is colored water you are applying. The technical term for this colored water is a "wash".

Everything must stay wet. When you apply a "wash" to any shape on the paper, the entire shape must stay wet until you are done with the application. This often means quickly going back over areas you've already painted just to keep them wet.

With a full painting, you should spend almost as much time planning as you do painting. Watercolor requires more planning than any other medium. There is an old saying in watercolor: "Plan like a turtle and paint like a rabbit." I usually don't put a lot of stock into old sayings, but this one is so true. People that watch me paint a full watercolor composition are often very disappointed to find that it is quite boring to watch, because for much of the time they see me I am just sitting there staring at my painting. That's because I am planning. In fact, it is common for me to tell observers to go do other things and when I am finally about to actually do something to my painting, I will let them know.

The consistency of your mixtures is the secret to controlling watercolor. The interaction of different mixture consistencies is the heart and soul of controlling watercolor. Many beginners think that you don't have much control with watercolor. The truth is that if you master mixture consistency, you not only have control, but I would argue that you have almost more control than other mediums. Most beginners are not taught how to master this, therefore, they end up thinking watercolor has no control.

A "tie-dye" mix is your best friend. When mixing two colors, make separate puddles of each color right next to each other. Then mingle them slightly where the puddles meet. When you pull paint from this mix, pull from one side, then the other side, then the middle. It gives you almost unlimited color variety in your mix but it still retains harmony within all of those colors. Very simple and very powerful!

Completely wet paper is completely safe to work on. When it begins to dry is when you need to watch out. If the paper is completely soaked, you can pretty much do anything you want and you will not run the risk of creating mud, backruns, or other unsightly things. When the paper begins to dry, it becomes more and more risky to work into it. It can be worked into as it's drying, and in fact you often NEED to work into it as it's drying. It is just that you really must know what you are doing and you need to have a mastery of paint consistency when you go to work into this partially dry paper.

"Backruns" are also know as "blossoms", "cauliflowers", "blooms", and other names. This is an effect that looks similar to a coffee stain. It is caused by adding a mixture that is relatively more wet to paper that is partially dry and relatively less wet. Because of the high osmotic difference, the water in the mixture being applied rushes forward into the less wet paper. As the water rushes forward on the paper, it pushes the paint particles in front of it sort of like debris in a flash flood. When the water stops moving, the accumulated particles settle at the edge of the where the water stopped and they create the coffee stain effect. As far as I know, this effect is unique to watercolor. It is usually created by accident and is usually not desirable. However, it actually can be created on purpose, and it can be used to create some useful effects such as distant trees, shrubs, and weedy areas.

Step back. A lot! I had always heard this advice, but it took me far too long to realize the importance of it. When you are painting in watercolor or any other medium, you need to very, very frequently step back (or scoot back if you are sitting) and look at what you have done from a normal viewing distance. A normal viewing distance of a painting is between 3 to 6 feet, or between 1 and 2 meters. The larger the painting, the further back the normal viewing distance is. This is so important because you can't really see what the true visual effect of what you have done is when you are up close at a "working distance". Representational painting is mostly about the illusion of realism created from optical blending at a distance. What this means in plain English is that the illusion of reality created by paintings is created by all of the individual, disparate marks, colors, and tones that seem like chaos up close, optically "merging" and optically blending when viewed at a distance into something that looks real. It is exactly like the individual squares of color on your computer screen called "pixels" merging together at a certain viewing distance to create an image or text. So you have to constantly back up and see your painting as it will be seen by viewers. Once I really understood how important this was, I found that I was moving back to view what I had done after almost every wash I did, or after about every 4-5 brushstrokes! In fact, I sit when I paint, and once I started to really use this "stepping back" idea properly, I actually had to get a new chair that had wheels on it. That way I could just "roll" back quickly, take a look, and then roll forward again!

Don't judge a painting until it's completely done. I can't overemphasize this enough. This is true for all painting mediums, but particularly with watercolor. Paintings will often look odd, strange, or just plain bad through various stages of their creation. It often is not until the very end, when the final darks and details are added that it all snaps together. Often this change at the end can be very, very dramatic, turning something that you "knew" was a failure into a wonderful piece. As you gain more experience, you will be able to judge if a painting has failed earlier and earlier in the creation stage, but this will never go away completely. After over 2 decades of painting watercolor, I still often think I have lost a painting only to find in the end that it looks great.

True understanding of watercolor is mostly about understanding the behavior of water solutions. This probably seems like an odd, overly-scientific statement, but it is just plain true. Control in watercolor is about controlling the different solvent-to-solute ratios between mixes, the brush, and the paper. The solvent here is water and the solute is paint. The concentration differences between the mix, the brush, and the paper set up diffusion differences that determine everything about how the paint behaves on the paper, where it goes on the paper, how far it goes on the paper, how it releases from the brush...everything! When you really start to get a feel for controlling watercolor, it becomes apparent that you are really just manipulating diffusion differences between water solutions. Diffusion is simply the scientific law that liquids flow from lower solute concentrations to higher solute concentrations. It is almost identical to osmosis, but without a permeable membrane. So, in the case of watercolor, solutions will flow from areas containing less paint concentrate to areas containing more paint. Another way of thinking about it is that solutions will flow from areas with more water to areas with less water. Of course, you aren't really analyzing these difference; you are just doing it by instinct. But if you understand this concept from the get-go, it helps you in your learning.