Watercolor Painting Tips

Watercolor is amazingly versatile form of art and crafts. Watercolor paintings bear a rich history, when the Egyptians used to paint huge frescoes with pigments based water color. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, used watercolor mixed with plaster to make frescoes and murals. One of the best examples of frescoes was the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican painted by Michelangelo. The Chinese, Korean and Japanese also practiced this art, to create beautiful illuminated manuscripts rich in culture and tradition, that was famous worldwide. Albrecht Durer's, landscape paintings in watercolor began to develop in the 1500s that was much appreciated. This medium of painting spread and spawned since 17th century and today, the techniques are improvised and various disciplines have evolved. The major exponents of watercolor painting in America, in the 20th century, were, Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth, Eliot O'Hara, Charles Burchfield, John Marin, and Alice Schille. Here, in this article, I shall elucidate the basic watercolor painting tips. Read more about watercolor painting techniques.

Watercolor Painting Tips and Tricks

Watercolor painting tips revolves around three basic things, viz. painting brush, color and water. It involves correct handling of brush, smooth blending of colors and adequate amount of water for mixing. Read the next points to get a vivid outline of watercolor painting. Get some more watercolor techniques for beginners.

Brush Type
The first thing you ought to know is the shape and size of your brush. Choose the brush size depending on the effects you want to create. Thick blending brush with higher size number is used for bigger size and full paintings. Fine brushes are used to highlight special features that requires intricate details. The brush can be round, flat, filbert, mops, acrylic, rigger or fan. Tufts, ferrule and the handle are the three parts of the brush. Your painting depends upon the part of the brush you are holding. So select your brush according to the nature of your painting.

Handling the Brush
You can give life to your painting only if you know the correct techniques of handling the brush. Never hold the brush tightly. Handling your brush is just similar to the way you control the steering of your vehicle. Grip the brush just like you handle your pen or pencil. You can also balance the brush with your fingers and apply differential strokes to bring the desired effects. You can control it linearly or pinch the brush on the paper. For smoothest brush strokes, hold the brush above the ferrule.

Watercolor Effects
Watercolor painting tips for beginners involves practicing various types of effects initially to master the art gradually. Start with flat wash, graded wash and glazed wash. Then move ahead with wet-in-wet and dry brush techniques. When you are proficient with these, try the advanced techniques, like splattering and spray textures, sgraffito and stamped textures or back wash and alcohol textures. You can next learn the techniques of plastic wrap and tissue paper texture. Making color grid is also a form of watercolor. Try the frisket painting and wax resist techniques also.

Color and Water
This is the most important aspect of watercolor. Since the art involves use of water, you need to know the amount of water to be mixed with the color to get the exact effect you want. Put the colors (either tube or poster colors, transparent or opaque, fugitive, non-fugitive, sedimentary, etc.) you want to paint with in your palette and then start adding water slowly with your brush. If you want to mix different shades, then learn the color mixing techniques first before blending colors. Watercolor painting can be completely wet, medium or dry. For wet-in-wet paintings, the whole painting will have a watery effect while dry painting involves minimal use of water and strokes with maximum color. Mixing colors is not at all complicated, if you know the effect you want to create.

It also involves use of natural, synthetic, organic or mineral pigments. Arabic gum is used as a fixative. Additives like glycerin, honey, ox gall are used as preservatives and to increase the durability and viscosity of colors, for generating differential effects. Sometimes, solvents are also added to improve the texture of color and to make it either dilute or concentrated. Read more on watercolor techniques for kids.

Safety Tips
Before you start your painting, always position the water bowl a bit away from the painting paper. Do do not shake the brush in order to dry it. Keep a cloth always at your hand to dry the brush so that its free from the colors you have used initially. Before applying new colors, ensure that you wash the brush. Always test the colors on a rough paper if you are a beginner. Remember to wash the brush completely clean, after you have finished your painting.

These watercolor painting tips, will be useful if you are about to begin with watercolor paintings. Above all, you can endow your paintings with life only if you have that caliber to paint what you imagine. You must feel like the renowned painter Carol P. Surface, who says "Pouring watercolor on paper stimulates me to wrest from my subconscious the images that reflect my spirit.