Movement & Shine: Watercolor on Paper

Once your palette has dried after a painting session, reanimating the paint dabs and the mixes you’ve already made on your palette follows a similar process. Use your brush to add water to the color mixtures to recreate your desired consistency. The dried paint dabs of the concentrated color can be reanimated slowly with water to get them back to their tacky, interactive form, so you can draw more paint pigment into your mixtures as needed.

MOVEMENT & SHINE: WATER c OLOR ON PAPER

Your brush is a guide: it deposits the paint and water mixture on your paper and creates boundaries for the paint. Where the water stops, the paint stops. With your wet brush, you suggest the shape and area for the paint to land, but the paint and water will move on their own within that wet boundary as they mix, dry, and blend. This is the magic of watercolor.

How do you achieve the right amount of movement for your paint on paper?

It begins with mixing that magic sauce on the palette first. Once you’ve created your desired consistency on the palette, you use your paintbrush to bring that sauce over to your paper to begin painting.

If you were to pick up your paper from your desk, as shown, your paint would stay within the wet boundary you’ve created. You know you have the correct ratio of paint to water if you can move your paper all the way around, and the wet boundary you’ve just painted doesn’t run. This means the mixture on your paper should form a small bead of water that moves around the boundary you’ve painted but doesn’t quite run out of the boundary.

In addition, you also want to see a layer of “fine shine” on your paper, whether it’s just a clear water wash before the paint is added, or a water/paint mixture. This is where the wet boundary catches and reflects the light as you tilt your paper this way and that.

Movement and shine—that’s what you want to see every time your paint colors touch your watercolor paper.

A NOTE ON PRE-WETTING YOUR PAPER

I’ve been asked often if I pre-wet my paper before I begin to paint. “Pre-wetting” simply means covering your entire paper with water, essentially creating a surface that will not have any hard lines: the entire paper is wet at the same time, allowing paint to move over the entire piece.

The key to understand pre-wetting comes down to understanding what paint does on wet paper. Paint moves into any part of the paper that is wet. When you pre-wet an entire page, you’re declaring your entire sheet as the wet boundary so your paint can move into any space it desires, provided it gets there before the water evaporates. With pre-wetting, it is difficult to create hard lines or intentional white space. It offers less control once your brush touches paper.

I don’t pre-wet my papers; I bring water to my paper in the form of my magic sauces and create a wet boundary within the small area I’m painting.