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Watercolor Painting Techniques Some Basic Skills


There are a number of basic skills that, as a watercolor painter, you

will need to learn. This article is going to briefly cover just a few of

them. For more information, please check my signature.

The very first thing you will need to learn how to do is draw a flat

wash. You will start by mixing a generous amount of medium intensity

paint on your palette. You want to use a flat brush. A Winsor and Newton

965 will do fine. You then want to saturate your brush and paint a thick

straight line from left to right on your canvas. Four to six inches in

length is fine.

After drawing the line, you want to repeat the procedure making sure that

you start at the bottom of the first stroke. The flood of the first

stroke should evenly flow into the second stroke. You then want to repeat

this for a third, fourth and fifth stroke and so on. After you are done

and the canvas dries, you should end up with an even toned square of color

as if the whole thing were painted with one stroke. Like I said, it takes

practice but is very important to master this.

Similar to the flat wash is the graded wash. The procedure is almost the

same except for each line that you draw, you’re going to use a slightly

lighter mixture of paint. So on your palette, you’re going to have to

include several mixtures in order to get the right effect. When you’re

done, the top of the square should be the darkest, the bottom of the

square the lightest and as you go from top to bottom, the color gets

lighter and lighter. Again, this takes some practice but is important to be able to master.

Finally, for this article, there is the glazed wash. This is where you

overlap colors to make interesting designs. Get a palette with different

shades of yellow, red, green and blue.

Pick any of the colors and draw, using a 1 inch flat sable brush, a

straight line about 6 to 8 inches wide. Then rinse off the brush and

choose another color. The color itself isn’t important. What you want to

do is draw another design slightly overlapping the first one. You will

notice how the second color slightly modifies the first one. Keep

repeating the process using different designs and overlaps.

For more great tips, check out my signature below.

Yes! We have lots more information on watercolor techniques, watercolor painting instruction and watercolor painting techniques… just visit our site, http://watercolorpainting.resourcegalore.com

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Three Great Pastel Painting Techniques

Soft pastels are popular because they combine bright colors with being an easy medium to work with. You could be walking past the studio area in your home, decide on a whim that you can afford to devote five minutes to a work-in-progress, and be adding to it literally seconds later. However, this ease doesn’t mean that working with pastels is free of technique – far from it. Here are three of the best.

1) Start with a drawing phase.

The ease with which you can add pastel pigment to your art paper actually means that more time should be devoted to planning and sketching than for other mediums. Otherwise you might find that you inadvertently wreck your artwork due to over-enthusiasm.

Artist Willow Charcoal is one of the best sketching tools for pastel artists, as it blends well with pastels and you can easily manipulate it on the surface or wipe it off using just your hand. Use it to sketch out your design, using a reference photo if you have one.

Once you’ve sketched out your design and you have the composition you want, you want to mark where the accents are – i.e. the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows. Use a white soft pastel for the highlights, and you can use either a dark soft pastel or just go on using the charcoal for the shadows. This step forces you to consider the number and position of your light sources, which is essential.

When you finish this sketching phase you should have a really good idea of where the artwork is going, even though there’s barely any color on the paper yet. With that done, you can work more freely on adding color.

2) Vary your pressure to create different effects.

How hard you press your pastel sticks against the paper is one of the big variables when working with pastels. Press harder and you’ll get a deeper, richer color. Back off the pressure and you can make delicate lines and shading effects.

Scumbling is the technique of using the side of a pastel stick and dragging it with light pressure across an area of a different color that you’ve already put down on your paper. This creates a sort of ‘broken color’ effect that works really well to represent clouds, fog, or distant elements of a landscape.

Light pressure is also used for hatching, which is laying down a series of lines close together. It’s great for shading.

Heavier pressure is used for laying down bold areas of color or shadow on your surface. You can put down layers on top of one another and then use a graffito technique (i.e. scratching or scraping through the top layer of pigment) to reveal the bottom layer through the top one.

3) Rubbing is your friend.

Rubbing is probably the most-used technique in pastels. Rubbing the pigment with a tool (like a paper stump) or with a finger or hand after it has been put down on the surface can have many effects. It can soften and blur the pigment (which otherwise can look quite ‘defined’ due to the tooth of the surface), or to blend adjacent areas of color, or to create gradations, or all of those at the same time! Because pastel colors can’t be mixed on a palette, they can only be mixed on the surface, and so rubbing and blending them together is also a way of creating new colors. Experiment with rubbing, and you’ll quickly find how useful it is.

Trying out different methods of pastel techniques can make all the difference in the world to your paintings.

Emma Ralph is an experienced pastel artist. To discover other pastel painting techniques visit www.paintingwithpastels.com