Basics about watercolors. Watercolor techniques: wash, dry brush, wet on wet.

1. Watercolors

2. What are watercolors?
• A watercolor is the medium or the resulting
artwork in which the paint is made of
pigments suspended in a water soluble
vehicle.
• Water, pigment, and paper interact
spontaneously, creating interesting colors,
shapes, and textures.

3. Watercolor techniques
• Watercolor painting has the reputation of being quite
demanding. Unlike oil or acrylic painting, where the
paints stay where they are put and dry more or less in
the form they are applied, water is an active partner in
the watercolor painting process, changing both the
absorbency of the paper when it is wet and the
outlines and appearance of the paint as it dries. The
difficulty in watercolor painting is almost entirely in
learning how to anticipate the behavior of water,
rather than attempting to control or dominate it.
• Some of the basic watercolor techniques are:
1-Washes 2-Wet on wet 3-Dry brush

4. Washes
Washes come in two basic flavors - solid and graded
The flat wash is the basic technique.
To achieve a fading effect, the pigment is diluted with more
water with every stroke.

5. Wet on wet
The technique is to use a wide brush and wet the paper before
applying watercolor into it. This will result into undefined marks
depending on the absorbency of the paper used
and the dampness of the paper.

6. Wet on wet

7. Wet on wet

8. Dry brush
This watercolor technique is the opposite application to the
wet in wet. Here the paint is dragged across the
paper without diluting it with water. The effects are crisp and
sharp. Dry brush is applied usually to achieve the most and
sharpest contrast.

9. Dry brush

10. Dry brush

11. Georgia O’Keefe

15. Carol Baumrucker

19. Other examples

20. Landscape

21. Still life

22. Portrait

23. Abstract

24. Make a sample sheet