I bought a watercolour box lately, because my old one had begun to fall apart. I picked a Winsor & Newton artist's watercolour 24 1/2 pan box and got a good price at Ken Bromley's art supplies online.
Watercolour? That pale, insipid enemy of amateur art classes the world over? The chosen, impossible medium of people who cannot paint?
Ease up there, tiger. Watercolour doesn't have to be pale and pretty. Remember Turner? Thomas Girtin? There is no medium more suited to certain effects of weather and light, and once upon a time it was pushed so as to rival oils in terms of painterly effects. If you know what you're doing, watercolour is a powerful medium.
Watercolour? That pale, insipid enemy of amateur art classes the world over? The chosen, impossible medium of people who cannot paint?
Ease up there, tiger. Watercolour doesn't have to be pale and pretty. Remember Turner? Thomas Girtin? There is no medium more suited to certain effects of weather and light, and once upon a time it was pushed so as to rival oils in terms of painterly effects. If you know what you're doing, watercolour is a powerful medium.
My old art teacher didn't like it because of the transparency, the very thing that makes it so special. He had a point; judging tone and colour values when you're using transparent washes can be a hit and miss business, and body colour only adds to the potential confusion. It's not an easy medium, which is why I would always advise any would be painter to start in oils. Also, watercolour lends itself to seductive chance effects that will undermine your work in the end. There's a constant temptation to be a bit flash, which, if entertained, will end badly.
But when it works... I've done precisely one watercolour landscape that worked exactly the way it was supposed to, and maybe one more that isn't half bad. They're both pretty small, and I only have one picture to hand, the half good one, here.
The trick - if you can call it that - is to know your limitations and stay within them. While not being too dull about it. Rehearsal helps you find out what you can do, and helps you learn how to push the envelope. I used to do small cloud studies every day on little squares of good paper, using a pocket set of watercolours and a collapsible brush. It helped immensely when it came time to paint skies, whether in oils or watercolour. It teaches you economy of means, which is an important principle in watercolour, perhaps more so than any other form of painting. You make the mark and move on. In oils you get as many goes as you need. In drawing, you make lines and rub them out if they're wrong. In watercolour, you'd better just get it right.
It's like drawing a line with a pen, except you're more likely drawing a whole area with a brush, defining all the edges at once and leaving exactly the right amount of wet paint in there that will, when dry, a) depict the precise value and colour you were after, and b) stay put and not run or bleed.
You can work into watercolour, but only to a certain extent. More than any other medium, if you fiddle with it, you will mess it up beyond repair. If you use good thick paper, you can soak it and pull paint off with a wet brush, and move it about a little. If you know what you're doing - and in this case I don't - you can manipulate the paint with gum arabic and other mediums. I stick to paint and water.
Watercolour painting is good in that it forces you to make simplifying decisions about what you can see in front of you. You have to know where the dark masses are, where the light masses are, their approximate hue and value, and then you have to work out how you're going to paint them in such a way as to avoid leaking edges. And you're going to have to figure out how much detail you want, and how you're going to leave white space for it. You have to think like a painter. It makes you edit what you see in a very painterly way.
