The Magic Sauce: Water-to-Paint Ratios

THE MAGI c SAU c E: WATER-TO-PAINT RATIOS

Finding the right balance of water and paint is the key to enjoying watercolor and creating lovely pieces, and it starts right on your palette. Before the paint ever touches your paper, it needs to be mixed on your palette and have both movement and shine.

People often ask me: How much water am I supposed to use? How much on my paper? How much on my brush? How much on my palette? Many videos and classes suggest “just a touch more water here” or “maybe a little more water to make that paint really move,” but how do you know if you’ve added enough? This all takes some practice, but I’ll try to keep things really simple to help you use water-to-paint ratios for the best outcome.

In teaching my students, I’ve found that it helps to explain paint consistencies using food analogies. I like to compare the consistencies of paint and water with well-known sauce textures. Throughout the book I refer to these as the “magic sauces,” and they should be easy for you to remember. If you get the hang of them now, you’ll have an easy time mixing your “sauces” for the lessons that follow.

To make your sauce, you’ll use your brush to bring water from your Mason jar to your palette. You can take your brush back to your water source as many times as you need in order to create your sauce so the paint mixtures on your palette begin to have movement.

To see if you’ve added enough water, pick up your palette and tilt it vertically, shifting it this way and that. If you see small raindrops of your paint and water mixture beginning to form, like the picture of my palette on page 23, you’re on the right track. You’re after both movement—the small drops moving on the surface—and shine—the surface of the mixture shining and reflecting the light. Movement and shine! Once you see this, be sure to maintain it on your palette for the entire time you are painting—otherwise, your paint mixtures won’t bring the desired effects to your watercolor paper.

Of course, there is a very wide range of paint-to-water ratios that people use to create their watercolor pieces. To keep things simple, and to share what works best for me, I will break down four go-to water-to-paint ratios—four magic sauces—that we’ll use throughout the book. Each of these consistencies creates different looking washes. As you’ll see, some are better for painting one thing and some are better for painting another.

Note: If you aren’t familiar with these food sauces in everyday life, you can easily find them at your local market. I suggest building your familiarity with these sauces, as they really are great comparisons as you learn to build your palette and work with water and paint. Above is a picture of Payne’s Gray watercolor paint in the four ratios laid out below, next to their corresponding real-life food sauce consistencies.

CONSISTENCY RATIO CONSISTENCY COMPARISON

Water / Paint 10w/90p 50w/50p 80w/20p 90w/10p Magic Sauce Mustard (with wet tube paint) Heavy Cream Soy Sauce with Wasabi Soy Sauce

To explain how to create a magic sauce, let’s use the 80w/20p “soy sauce with wasabi” consistency as an example.

If your water is your soy sauce, and your dab of tube paint is your dab of spicy wasabi, use your brush to bring water to the dab of concentrated paint and draw out a bit of the pigment into your water. Continue to add water with your brush until you have a mixture of about 80 percent water and 20 percent paint—80w/20p. The food analogy continues here, as wasabi is incredibly potent, and a little goes a long way—same as a fresh dab of tube paint, which is extremely concentrated. By using your brush to carefully draw just a bit of the pure pigment away from the dab and into your water mixture, you stretch the contents of your paint tube and only use what you need. Keep adding water as needed, diluting and creating your “soy sauce with wasabi” consistency.

This method applies to all four of our sauces, each consistency requiring a different ratio of water to paint—from the most concentrated paint mixture of “mustard” (only 10 percent water and 90 percent paint) to the least concentrated, highly diluted “soy sauce” (90 percent water and only 10 percent paint).