Never Give Up!!!!!!!

6th October 2011

Post with 35 notes

How’d you get that watercolor effect in the sky??

A few people have asked me about the techniques in this painting so I thought I’d share- mainly about the way the watercolors dried I think.

Anyways the short answer is SALT.  It’s a technique called salt resist.  If you throw down salt on an area of paint as it’s drying, the salt will push away the pigment around the salt.

The other answer thing is controlled drying times (sort of).  If an area of color dries at the same rate the gradient will be really smooth, but if the one area dries at different rates, you’ll get different effects.

So say you put down a whole bunch of water and add blue pigment to it evenly.  Wait a few minutes and when it’s half dry, take a wet brush and add more water or paint to an area and it’ll fan out as it dries differently.

Another important thing is that you’ll get different effects if you apply water and then apply pigment compared to applying pigment directly. I tend to put down water first unless I’m working a really small area.  I tend to always work with a little piece of paper towel in hand to dab up certain areas if I want to (it also works kind of as an eraser).

ALSO water will pool in some areas- the areas with less water will dry faster.  Depends on how wrinkly your paper is and how much water you use. 

Anyways the most important advice I could give is to use lots of water.  Most people don’t use enough and it comes out looking like really strokey markers.  Which could be cool!!! Really it depends on what effect you want.  But I use quite a bit of water. 

Someday I’ll make a real tutorial with pictures I think, but hopefully this will do for now.  And I hope this helps someone!

Tagged: textQuestionswatercolor