Watercolor Painting Techniques – Some Basic Skills
There are a number of basic skills that, as a watercolor painter, you will need to learn. This article is going to briefly cover just a few of them. For more information, please check my signature.
The very first thing you will need to learn how to do is draw a flat wash. You will start by mixing a generous amount of medium intensity paint on your palette. You want to use a flat brush. A Winsor and Newton 965 will do fine. You then want to saturate your brush and paint a thick straight line from left to right on your canvas. Four to six inches in length is fine.
After drawing the line, you want to repeat the procedure making sure that you start at the bottom of the first stroke. The flood of the first stroke should evenly flow into the second stroke. You then want to repeat this for a third, fourth and fifth stroke and so on. After you are done and the canvas dries, you should end up with an even toned square of color as if the whole thing were painted with one stroke. Like I said, it takes practice but is very important to master this.
Similar to the flat wash is the graded wash. The procedure is almost the same except for each line that you draw, you’re going to use a slightly lighter mixture of paint. So on your palette, you’re going to have to include several mixtures in order to get the right effect. When you’re done, the top of the square should be the darkest, the bottom of the square the lightest and as you go from top to bottom, the color gets lighter and lighter. Again, this takes some practice but is important to be able to master.
Finally, for this article, there is the glazed wash. This is where you overlap colors to make interesting designs. Get a palette with different shades of yellow, red, green and blue.
Pick any of the colors and draw, using a 1 inch flat sable brush, a straight line about 6 to 8 inches wide. Then rinse off the brush and choose another color. The color itself isn’t important. What you want to do is draw another design slightly overlapping the first one. You will notice how the second color slightly modifies the first one. Keep repeating the process using different designs and overlaps.
For more useful tips about Watercolor Painting, please check this great resource Review Of Watercolor Made Easy.
