@transzo replied to a post:
i always wondered how you managed to lay watercolor down so evenly and how ur colors always manage to be so vibrant omg. do dye based watercolors tend more towards that??
oh man OKAY SO...it's complicated (as all things w/ watercolor seem to be 😓)
like, dye-based watercolors ARE known for being super vibrant! so if you want bright colors they're a good go-to, but the drawback is that they are not lightfast, so if exposed to even a moderate amount of natural light for a long period of time, the paints will loose their color (if you hang a dye-based watercolor painting on the wall of your room, even if its not in direct sunlight, it will look obviously different by the time a year has gone by! this isn't a problem for me since i don't really display the things i make)
but the SMOOTHNESS is a little more nuanced—smoothness in watercolor, as long as ur working with even moderate quality paints, is dependent on how it interacts with the water, so hypothetically you should be able to get a similar quality of smoothness from liquid watercolor as you would from tube'd watercolor or even watercolor that comes from a pan or half-pan (the cute little plastic squares with dried pigment) as long as you thoroughly mix them with water, rather than just rubbing a wet brush on the paint—here, i'll attach a little video where i use a Black Sheep half-pan to get a relatively simple brown:
(it normally would not take so much effort to mix the paint from the half-pan with the water, but i took a little extra time bc this is a sped-up video—when my hand moves off to the right i'm adding more water, but when it moves upward or upward to the left, i'm adding just a touch of red and black to the brown)
the paintings there are comparative, the one on the left (which i paint in the video) is the one painted with Only with my half-pan watercolors, and the one on the right, which i do not touch, was painted with the liquid watercolor. mostly, the differences between the two are in the hues of the colors, which is not the fault of either paint, but just in my mixing ability (i forgot i could use black with the dyes, so its a messy grey)
i will note that the pan watercolors have slightly more grain to the texture, but even that isn't very noticeable unless you're looking for it. so, basically, if it's smoothness you're after, i think you can get it with any medium of watercolor!
in fact, here's some color swatches i did for trying to match his skin tones and anbu vest—
there's some slight grain in the darker skin-swatch, and a noticeable amount of grain/speckling in the grey swatch—i've found the mars black has an interesting tendency to separate into a kind of scaly texture called granulation, which i like but i definitely something to be aware of!
otherwise, the differences between the dye and the half-pans in terms of texture is otherwise fairly negligible as long as i thoroughly mix the pigment with water
