Transform Your Watercolor Paintings With Better Water Control

If you painted watercolor for very long at all, you probably have realized how important it is to control the amount of water and paint that you are using. This is essentially the key to watercolor painting, the key to values, the key to timing, and creating a painting with compelling light is understanding some fundamental things about how you use your supplies and how much water and paint that you are using. So today I have some very practical tips on how to manage that as well as a key practice that I'm going to show you at the end. Here's my palette. In order to use these paints effectively, they need to be activated. And how we activate the paints is we spray them. You make them nice and wet so when you're going to mix your colors and create your mixtures, it's easy to access the paint. If these bits of paint on my palette are dry and I'm just using a little bit of moisture on my brush to try to get a rich mixture, it's never going to happen. So the first thing that I do is I open up my palette and I spray the paints really well. For that, I just use a spray bottle and I go around to all the wells and just really spray them nicely. I've had students ask me before, do I put fresh paint on my palette before each painting, and the answer is no. I'm just using the paint from my wells that I've already put there. The way I'm able to do that is by spraying them down really well before I get started. Now if I was going to paint something like a nocturne scene where I really needed some strong values, I might consider adding some fresh paint to get a really, really rich mixture. But I'd say for 90% of my paintings, I'm just opening up my palette, spraying my paints really well, and just going from there. Now this is a John Pike palette, and what I like about this palette is it has plenty of mixing space. It can hold a lot of different colors, but also it has a nice cover to it. When I'm not painting, I'll put the cover on like this, and that will actually keep a lot of the moisture in there, and it keeps my paintings from drying out as much. Another very practical tip is to use a sponge in your mixing process. So I have this sponge right here. When I am mixing colors, it's tempting to get some of a color, get it here, and then go rinse or brush off, and then go over to here, and get some of my cobalt turquoise there, and then rinse or brush off, and maybe need some more raw sienna, and come back here. What you realize after you've been doing this for a little bit is that you are adding a lot of water every time you go in and get some more pigment. So what you need to do is have a nice sponge by your palette. So I can rinse my brush, I can dry it off, then I can get my pigment and go over here and mix. That can help me keep a better handle on my water to paint ratio. If you don't use a sponge in that way, a lot of times you will water your mixture down quite a bit without even realizing it. If this brush is wet, it holds a lot of water, as do most mop brushes. So look at this. That's all the water I'm adding into the mixture each time if I'm just rinsing my brush and then going to the next pigment. So as you mix more and more, that really adds up and dilutes your mixture, which leads to a wash which affects your values and creates problems down the road. Keep an eye on that and use a sponge next to your palette. I will often paint with a paper towel in my hand. If I pick up a lot of paint and water on my brush, it's more wet than I want it to be in that moment for my painting. I'll just dab it on the paper towel that I'm holding. Why is this so important in watercolor? Well, the strength of your mixture is going to determine the strength of your value in your painting. That's why we want to keep close tabs on these things. You know, thinking of your values from a level of zero through ten. So your lightest lights in your painting to your darkest darks. Most scenes, you want to have a full range of values and that can vary depending some on the subject or the atmosphere of the subject or what it is that you're going for. But if you find that your paintings are often too light, that means that you don't have a full range of values. What I see a lot from students is they're really living right around here in their mixtures. They're getting like a zero through seven but not quite able to push past that and get up to the strength of ten. And when we don't have that darker side of the values, that upper range of strength in the painting, that is when we are really struggling to create light within our scene. So if you've been watching this channel for a while, you know I talk a lot about values and how crucial it is to understand values to create compelling light in your paintings. This is very fundamental to that knowledge. Realizing that from light to dark, that's a full range of values and we want to have that within our paintings. And that's where the water to paint ratio and controlling that becomes so important. One nice way to think about the consistency of your mixtures is to think about some common consistencies that we are somewhat familiar with. So tea, milk, cream, or butter. So a really light wash would land as tea. A little stronger is milk. A little stronger than that is cream. And even stronger than that is butter. Now this is not science here. This is just a general way of thinking about this so you can be aware of how strong your mixtures are. I've heard several people teach on very similar topics. Joseph Zbukvic has his watercolor clock that is a nice way of thinking about the consistency and then when to apply that consistency on your paper. And this is kind of a simplified version of that to help you get a handle on mixing those different strengths. So the practice for this is a pretty simple one. We are going to use just one color. We're going to use neutral tint and I'm going to show you a good way to practice these different consistencies. So let's start off with a little bit of water and some neutral tint. A really light mixture here. So this right here is like a really weak tea. A really weak tea mixture. And we'll put that one right here. So this is what we're using for a lot of the lights in the painting. The lightest values of the scene. Just taking away the white of the paper. That's this consistency. Now when we get a little bit stronger we'll add some paint to that. A little stronger here. And we want to think of about the consistency of milk. And of course that depends on which type of milk you have. Whether it's skim milk or whole milk that makes a difference. But stronger than the tea wash. I'm going to add a little more paint. Mine looks a little weak. Okay. All right. So that's a bit stronger than tea. There's the milk consistency. From there let's mix a cream consistency. So that's more paint into this mixture. All right. And we'll go over to here. And I'm going to go a touch darker. Add a little more paint. That's why this is such good practice. To get used to mixing these different consistencies. Okay. A little more paint. So that's stronger than the milk. All right. And for our last value. The butter consistency. I'm going to rinse my brush out. I'm going to touch it to the sponge. And now I'm getting mostly paint. You know my brush is kind of wet. But mostly paint. And I'll do a touch of water just to help me mix it. And you see how it's kind of scraping across the paper. Because the consistency is different. It's not as much water. And it's mostly paint. I'll go a little stronger on this. Now you can see a simple way to practice that consistency of tea, milk, cream, or butter. I hope that these practical tips in this way of thinking about your consistency of your mixture is helpful for you in your painting process. It's great to always come back to these fundamentals to think about how we're managing the water and the pigments on our palette to keep our growth moving forward. I have a free resource for you. If you'd like to know more about my process and my approach to painting, take a look at this. Have you ever been really excited about a painting and you get all set up, you find that right reference that you're excited about, and then it's time to go and you feel lost? I have a free resource that I want to give to you today that can help with these problems. My five steps to plan a successful watercolor painting. I walk you through the crucial planning phase of your painting that will help you understand what you're going to paint first, second, and third. The planning is really so important, especially in watercolor. This medium is harder to correct. It's so immediate, so having that plan is very important. I send you a PDF that you can download, and the great thing about this is you can have it on your phone. You could print it out. You can download this right now before you start your next painting. All you have to do is follow this link here and download my five-step guide to planning a successful watercolor painting.