Watercolor's Greatest Advantage

Jan 19, 2022

 

Watercolor has its unique challenges that we’re all familiar with. 

Maybe you have issues with your painting drying up or blooms occurring as you paint. Maybe you feel like you have something figured out and then the water and pigment mixes together and does something that you haven’t seen before.

Watercolor is mysterious in this way, and it is not easily fixed.

But today I'm going to talk about one advantage of watercolor that you don’t really find in any other medium: the beautiful wet-in-wet transition from color to color. 

Of course, you can blend in other mediums, but this really beautiful way that colors mix together on the paper in watercolor provides you this opportunity to embrace the unintended beauty - to let go and see what happens on the page. 

I am often asked what colors I have on my palette, but I think it's also important to talk about mixing colors on your painting. You know, I like to wet down both sides of my paper, and I like to let colors mix during the first wash of my painting. 

What I do is I go around the scene and find local colors and put them on the paper while the paper's wet. When I do this, it gives me a really loose and abstract effect. And in this process of painting, we're going from loose and abstract to more and more refined and more and more separated as we go throughout our painting process.

Recently, I was talking with a student about how we're trying to find one big shape in our painting, and we want to go from object to object of similar value and try to connect them.

And he asked me, “Do I just switch colors when I get to the next object and let them blend together?” 

And I said, “Yes, that's exactly what we want.” 

We want to find areas where those colors can blend together to create that really beautiful transition that happens between pigments on the page.

Another way to take advantage of this quality of watercolor is to use it to show light bouncing off of objects. So the color of the sky you might see reflected in the snow or the color shining off a house you might see reflected in the ground. You might not want this on every scene, but it's definitely an interesting light effect that you can create by allowing the colors to blend together instead of keeping them separate. 

We can also create beautiful skies by painting soft transitions of color with just a few confident brushstrokes, whereas in other mediums, it might take a lot of blending to create this beautiful transition.

Before you go, I want to recommend that you check out my free video lesson: How to Avoid Overworking Your Painting. I've got some great feedback on this lesson from students. This video lesson helps you address a common struggle, which is overworking your painting. I know I struggled with this a lot when I started out. You can follow the link below or access it in my Instagram bio. Take a look at it, and I hope it helps you out! 

 

Until next time, keep practicing, keep working hard, and keep showing up in your painting practice!

Stop Overworking Your Paintings!

Watch my FREE Video Lesson 7 Secrets of Fresh, Powerful Painting.

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