Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium (20 page)

How wet is the brush compared to the paper?
Always knowing the answer to this question will prevent the majority of wetness problems. If you are not sure of the relative wetness of the brush and the paper, you would be wise to figure it out before making another stroke. Cultivating a sensitivity to any uncertainty about this relationship will keep you out of all kinds of trouble.

Try the following experiment before you read on. Make a 6 × 6–inch (15 × 15–cm) semigloss wash of any color on a piece of paper. Your brush will still be somewhat wet.
Do not wash your brush,
but add some pigment of a new color to it. (I know, I am asking you to touch the paint on your palette with a dirty brush! See
this page
for more about this.) On a dry area of the palette, notice how the paint behaves. It should be less fluid than the initial wash. Now make a stroke of the new color in the middle of the wash. Observe how it spreads.

Next, make another 6 × 6–inch (15 × 15–cm) semigloss wash, just like the first one, on a second piece of paper. This time, wash your brush and
load
it with the second color. Try to make your brush
wetter
than the paper. Make the same kind of stroke in the middle of the wash, and watch what happens.

In the first case, the brush was not wetter than the wash, because no water was added to it. The stroke of new color stayed where you put it, with some softening of the edges. In the second case, the brush was wetter than the wash. The liquid flowed from the brush, pushed aside the suspended pigment of the initial wash like flotsam in the path of a flood, and dropped it at the edges when the spreading stroke reached equilibrium. Voilà—a bloom.

The soft-edged stroke from the first half of the experiment is the kind of mark that is appropriate for countless situations. The bloom, on the other hand, is usually a big mistake.

JIAUR RAHMAN,
SILENT LOVE,
2002
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
30 × 22 INCHES (76 × 56 CM)

Being conscious of the relative wetness of brush and paper allows the artist to use a variety of edges to establish an effective illusion of light, space, substance, and mood. In a twist on the usual approach to depicting depth, Rahman gives the dark foreground shapes soft edges, while the pale background forms are hard-edged.

TOM HOFFMANN,
New Year,
2010
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES HOT PRESS PAPER
22 × 30 INCHES (56 × 76 CM)

This simplified landscape was done entirely while the surface was wet. The three colors in the cloud were laid down gold first, then light gray, and finally dark gray. In the process, the brush was never dipped into the water bucket. The gold was used as part of the light gray mix, which, in turn, was used as part of the dark gray.

TOM HOFFMANN,
NEEDLES,
2010
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES HOT PRESS PAPER
30 × 22 INCHES (76 × 56 CM)

Just in case you’ve never seen a bloom before, there’s one in the green foothill. In a painting that is about the fluidity of the paint as much as it is about the scene being depicted, that telltale edge is not unwelcome and certainly less obtrusive than “correcting” it would be. But even if you can sometimes accept blooms, it is still a good idea to know how
not
to make them.

Any time you plan to touch a wet brush to wet paper, your job is to stay aware of the relative wetness of the two. Considering the tendency brushes have to keep trying to get too wet, what can you do? There are actually only two places your brush can sneak into extra water: the water bucket and the puddles on your palette. If you stay out of those two spots and work reasonably quickly, your brush will not be wetter than the paper, and you will not cause blooms. Period.

“But, how do I wash my brush if I can’t dip into the water bucket?” you ask.

Consider not washing it.

To many watercolorists this is a cardinal sin. It certainly goes against what your kindergarten teacher told you. But remember: Every time you dip into the water bucket you lose track of how wet the brush is compared to the paper. Alarms should go off. Maybe it’s not necessary as often as you think. Whatever objections you have to
not
washing your brush, I contend that for wet-on-wet work you gain far more than you lose.

Most of the initial load of paint you put on the brush was used to make the wash, so there really isn’t much left, anyway. Whenever you apply paint to an already painted surface you are effectively mixing colors, since the transparency of watercolor allows the first layer to show through the second. How bad can it be, then, for a little of the first color to still be on the brush when you add the second? If you are proceeding from
light to dark, as is usually the case, the issue of combining colors on the brush becomes even less troublesome.

If you are still shaking your head, you may be concerned about polluting your colors on the palette. I usually work from hardened lumps of paint, which can be easily cleaned with a wet brush on the rare occasion when I need a color in its pure form. Most of the time, a little leftover color from the last transgression doesn’t worry me. If I have fresh paint in my palette and a “dirty” brush, I take care to pick up the new color from the edge of the blob, avoiding introducing orange into the middle of my cerulean.

Having made my case, I should add that there are times when I can’t help losing track of how wet the brush is. If I change brushes, of course, I am automatically in uncertain territory. Even if I keep using the same brush, as I did for
New Year,
shown opposite, there are some times when I have no choice but to wash it. When I paint clouds and sky, for example, I like to do the blue last, after all the cloud shadows are in place. This means that when I am ready for a nice, clean cobalt or cerulean, my brush is still charged with a fairly dark neutral from the shadows, which would be deadly to the blue. So, I wash the brush.

I usually want the blue to merge with the gray shadows along the bottom edge of the clouds. These are theoretically still damp, so if the brush is even a tiny bit too wet, a bloom will occur, spoiling the illusion of vast space. I shake or wipe the excess water from the brush, then try a stroke on clean paper to get a look at the sheen. If I think it’s dry enough, I add the blue and try it on the palette. I’m ready. Maybe. Of course, by now so much time has passed that the paper is almost certainly drier than the brush. With red flags waving, I make a small stroke in an inconspicuous place … 
Ah,
but there is another way. Read on.

Rewetting is an essential tool for taking the anxiety out of the watercolor process. Once a painted area is
completely
dry, you can go over it with a wet brush without disturbing the paint at all. There are exceptions, as we will see, and some skills to practice, but for the moment let’s just rejoice in this wonderful news. It means nothing less than that you can add another layer and control its edges whenever you want.

So make sure to ask yourself, early and often:
Can I rewet this area?
Remembering to ask this one question will save you from getting panicky about fast-drying paint.

Here is a rewetting exercise that makes good use of an old, failed picture: First, dig through the archives for a “dead” painting that you know is completely dry. Load a large brush with clear water, and make a wash right on top of a relatively simple and pale part of the painting. Be efficient in the application of the water, taking care not to move your brush back and forth too much in any one spot. Next, add some pigment to your brush, and make some strokes in the wet area. Note how the strokes you added look like they were made while the original first layer was fresh.

To explore the limits of the technique: Wet another section of the old painting, this time going back and forth in the same spot until the original paint begins to lift and move. Then, find a heavily pigmented section of the painting, such as the darkest dark, and try rewetting there. Is it making a muddy mess? I’ll discuss the limits of this technique in a minute, but first, let’s review why it works when it does.

Once a stroke or wash of watercolor paint is thoroughly dry, the pigment particles are coated with a combination of the gum arabic binder that is part of the paint and some of the gelatin that is the sizing on the surface of good paper. This double coating also acts as a glue to stick the pigment to the paper. When you brush over it, the water sits on top of the original paint without disturbing it. New paint laid into that water acts very much like paint applied to fresh paper.

In the exercise above, you probably observed that the darkest areas of the painting released their pigment and looked muddy much sooner than paler sections. There is a limit to the capacity of the binder and sizing to hold on to the pigment. It is possible to have so much color in an area that it is unwise to try to rewet it. If the dry paint looks shiny, it is best to leave it alone. (Whether the paint should ever have gotten that thick in the first place is material for another argument between the purists and the progressives.)

If the first layer is not completely dry, rewetting can be disastrous. The pigment will be disturbed, resulting in the ultimate watercolor catastrophe:
mud.

With these few exceptions, you can rewet a painting just as if you were working on blank paper. How much water you apply depends on how long you want it to stay wet, and how far you want your new layer to spread. Practice until you feel confident.

TOM HOFFMANN,
ACCESO,
2009
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES HOT PRESS PAPER
11 × 15 INCHES (28 × 38 CM)

The whole ground plane in this scene was painted with an initial wash of light yellow oxide, like the sunlit area in the background. After the wash had dried, it was rewet with clear water, and the soft-edged foreground shadows were added.

JOYCE HICKS,
THIS WAY TO THE VINEYARD,
2010
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
18 × 24 INCHES (46 × 61 CM)

Although almost every shape in this painting is hard-edged, there is no confusion about where the various elements are in space. The artist relies on composition and subtle value transitions to create the illusion of depth and to direct the viewer’s attention.