I love your watercolor style! Any tips?
Hm… Let’s see. Watercolor is a good medium for blending and layering color—it’s usually best to start lighter and add pigment in layers, since it’s hard to remove paint, and watercolor is transparent, so once the color’s been added it’s there to stay. Add your hi-lights first, and then your shadows. As an example of what can happen if you do the opposite, Well….
Yeah…. Probably should have cut my losses sooner with that one. It’s also a good idea to be flexible if you use watercolors, because unless you go really slowly, something’s going to end up in the picture that you didn’t originally plan for. Mistakes don’t always have to ruin your piece—sometimes they can enhance it:
In this case, the black paint smeared on the Cellist, and the piece was due the next day, so instead of starting over, I decided to make more sharp smears in the other parts of the painting and make it a part of the picture. I feel like it adds drama and makes the painting as a whole more interesting. Since this happened, it’s become a part of my art style to add background splashes and streaks of mismatched color, because I know I won’t be able to paint in the lines. Speaking of lines, let’s talk about line-art and watercolor. If you’re using ink of any kind for your pictures, either add it last or make sure it’s water resistant, because a lot of liners smear when they make contact with water. My favorite brand is Micron Pens, since they line cleanly, they’re fast drying, and you can paint right over them and they don’t smear at all!
If you want to, though, you can do line work with watercolors paints, you just need a detail brush, a high amount of pigment in proportion to water, and a whole lot of patience. Here’s an example of a piece I did where I used this technique:
This method tends to look more natural when you do it, so I tend to reserve it for my more ambitious art pieces. It takes a lot of time though, so I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re trying to paint fast. You can also just do Pencil underneath, without any darker lines. I did this a lot when I was younger because I preferred the way it looked back then:
Whatever look you want to achieve.
As to blending colors: Opposites tend to make brown, but you’ll get different kinds of brown depending on what shades you use. For example, if I mix the green and the red the Mad hatter is waring in the image above, I end up with a sort of foresty black color. If I mix an oreangy yellow with purple, I usually end up with a warmer almost honey brown color. One of the best ways to learn how to color blend is to pull out a piece of paper and just try different color combinations—paying attention to trends and noting which colors mix the best. It’s really fun, like science. (Technically it is actually science.) It’s something you’ll naturally get better at the longer you paint, so don’t worry if you can’t get the colors to look the way you want. I still can’t seem to make my green show up on my Black Cat designs, no matter what I mix. :(
See? You can barely tell his eyes are green. What’s up with that? Anyway….
For cheap Watercolor brands, Go with Crayola or Masters touch, and steer clear of any Crazy Art or anything that looks more like a Tums than paint. Dry watercolors are best if you want convenience or maximum possible control over the consistency of the paint1-they’re generally easier to use and easier to store. However, liquid watercolors (the kind you get in tubes that look a bit like acrylics when you squeeze them out) are usually better for higher pigment quality and tend to give you more options. They also have the added bonus of being long term use, even after they’ve dried out, so keep them on your pallet until they’re used up! Once they’re dried, they act basically the same as the ones that come dry, but still have the better pigment quality, so if you have the patience for that, they’re generally the better option. If you do use them wet, though, you can achieve some pretty interesting results:
They almost act as a sort of hybrid between acrylics and Watercolors, so that can be a lot of fun. :)
Anyway, hopefully some of that was useful. If I confused you, I apologize. There are a lot of really good tutorials on YouTube for this stuff, btw, so if you want more instruction, that’s a great place to look for it. Anyway, that’s it for me. Hope that was a good use of your time. :)
