Let’s learn how to use watercolor. The watercolor technique is a very popular medium for painting. Everyone loves watercolor paintings. Infect Watercolor has versatile, wonderful, and very elegant effects on the surface. That’s why the trends of watercolor painting have never died.
This article will simply introduce beginners to the watercolor technique. We will discuss how to start to apply watercolor, how to mix color, blend, wash, and many more. So let’s get started.
Material for Watercolor
- Watercolor tubes
- Watercolor Papers
- Brushes
- Water container
- Pencil
Watercolor Tubes
There are so many brands of color available in the market. Basically, watercolor sets come in different quality- student quality and Artist quality. You can often find these color in these two following forms:
Watercolor Tube- Mostly artists use these colors in tubes. The good quality these colors’ tubes are easily available at a reasonable rate with high quality. You should buy at least a set of 12 color tubes shades.
Watercolor Cakes- Cakes of these colors are less popular than tubes for beginners. Normally, high-quality these colors cakes are too expensive to buy for beginners. Some professional masters use cakes of high quality.
However, if you are a beginner, choose watercolor tubes.
Paper
There are many brands available in the market. But as a beginner, you can use simple drawing sheets. Your sheets should be a little bit rough and off-white.
Brushes
After color & paper, the time is to talk about brushes. The uses of brushes vary from artist to artist. Basically, you should have some flat brushes for the wash and round brushes for painting. You should have various numbers range of brushes so that you can use them for every detail of the painting.
How to start
Watercolor means as you can see ‘water’ word before coloring. So the use of water is important and will be used maximum for applying these colors. We will discuss the simple process of these colors. Later on, some useful lessons will be followed covering some specific areas of this technique.
Technique
Basically, there are two most popular techniques for applying watercolor:
- Opaque Technique
- Transparent Technique
However, I’ll recommend Transparent Technique to start with. Infect, it’s a real technique that has the charm and beauty of watercolor. Besides this, I will cover the Opaque technique in a separate article very soon.
Transparent Technique
Before starting keep in mind the following points and remember them while applying watercolor:
- Draw with light pencil lines. Dark pencil lines may be seen after coloring them.
- Always use Light to the dark process of color
- Don’t use white color to lighten the color, use the natural white surface of paper for this purpose. To get a light shade or tint of a color, use water to get that.
Process
Step 1
Drawing
The drawing of the theme or object which will be painted should be light. Only the area which will be painted as dark may be marked dark. This color has a transparent effect. If we use dark lines or dark drawings, it will appear after coloring.
Step 2
Follow Light to Dark Color Process
Always use a light color first. Many artists wash the surface with water. It makes the color to spread easily. More ever, it also gives artists extra time to work on. Otherwise, if you apply color on a dry sheet, it will dry early.
So, in step two, we have to apply all the light colors to our painting. Basically, we complete all light filling of color in this step.
Step 3
Dark shades
After filling all the light color areas, now we can start applying dark colors. Using dark colors on light colors gives us the chance to correct or readjust our painting color scheme. However, all the required dark colors are applied in this step.
Step 4
Finishing Touch
Finishing This is the last step to finish the work. After applying light and then dark color, finishing will be given to the painting. You are free to use any color as per the requirement of the painting. You can use white color or black too if you feel they are required. Infect, we complete the painting just adding whatever we feel to add.
Conclusion
Watercolor painting can not be learned in a day. Great dedication and regular practice are required to be a master of this technique. However, a simple process or technique has been described here step by step to guide all beginners. Definitely the video that is embedded here will help you to understand this technique.
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