By Lorraine Brady Arthur
Colors become lighter by adding more water.
Colors become darker by adding less water.
You will get different paint reactions depending on whether you’re working on wet paper or dry paper. Experiment with using the tip of the brush to float paint into the water of a wet area to get a fresh look.
DO NOT over work your paint! Learn to leave it alone, or you will lose the freshness of the paint. Instead it will look “dead” and dull.
Avoid mixing more than two to three opaque pigments together (when using little water) or your paint may dry dull.
Learn your three pigment groups: transparent, opaque, and (transparent) staining colors. Learn to use each of the three pigment groups.
Transparents are great for washes and glazing, or when you need a lighter value color. Layer upon dry layer can be laid on top of the other and still see the white of the paper. This is part of the great beauty of watercolor.
Opaques can be thinned down to a wash, but they have a more coarse pigment that does not share the same fineness of transparent pigments. Because they do not share the same transparency, they are darker in value than transparent pigments. They make good halftone values, since they start to block out the white of the paper. They are wonderful to use in creating interesting textures or contrast with transparents.
Staining colors are transparent, but they stain the white of the paper or any other color underneath them! When rewet they can run. However, since they stain the white of the paper, they are valuable in creating darker values to create contrast in a painting. |
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