Watercolor - Getting your timing right: What comes Between Wet on Dry and Wet on Wet!?

1. How to Get your Timing Right in Watercolor: Hello fellow artists and thanks for coming to have a look at my lesson. I'm a professional artists, but I'm mostly self-taught. I've learned a lot by trial and error. That's why devised personally this lesson. And I'm dedicating it to a younger me when I first started out painted. You always hear about painting or dry paper or wet on wet. But there's an awful lot that comes between that. That's why I've devised this lesson. Timing in painting is very important. Admittedly, it's not going to be the most exciting of lessons, but I think it's really, really essential. It's very brief. So bear with me right through to the end because I'm going to tell you some things that may seem obvious at the end, but you really need to get the hang off. We're going to be learning about timing in watercolor painting. In combination with the consistency of the paint you're using, you won't have a finished painting. Your have a couple of sheets, a reference material that you can use in the future. You might also like to follow me here on Scotia because I upload new lessons regularly. And I have some really nice lessons out there for you, which will give you some really nice paintings at the end of each lesson, let's get those paintings skills up to the next level. Thank you for joining me. 2. Mixing Different Dilutions of Paint: Hello there, and thanks for joining me in this new lesson. Today. It's going to be quite a brief lesson, but I think it's going to be really, really useful. I devised this lesson for you because when I first started out in watercolor, I would hear wet on dry. I would hear about wet on wet. But nobody ever said what comes in between that. And timing is extremely important in watercolor, along with the consistency of your paint in combination with the wetness of your paper. So that's why I thought about this lesson and how I could teach you what I wish I'd been taught when I first started out in watercolor. So that's what we're going to do today. These are my materials, so I've just got some really simple materials. A couple of tubes of paint, a blue one and a red one. I've got a large soft brush. I've also got a small squirrel mop. You can use your two favorite brushes. You don't have to have the same as me. Then I've also got three tops off of some jars that were in my kitchen. I've got one jar of clean water and a shallow jar that came off a crème brulée and dropper and some narrow masking tape. I want narrow masking tape You'll see why in a second. And I've got some arches 300 gram cold press paper, which even though you can see in the French says fine grain, it actually is a little bit rough. It's not perfectly smooth. And this is my favorite paper to work with. I've got tonight really well, so I know how it reacts. It's important to get to know your paper. Don't keep swapping papers over. Make sure you get to know one and stick to it unless you're doing experimentation, then of course use whatever paper you like. I've also got my plywood board, which I'm not going to prop up today, if you followed my other lessons, you'll see that are usually prop it up, at a 30-35 degree angle. Today I've got it laying flat, so let's start by taping our paper. What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna tape it so that I get 12 different squares. Make sure that's sticking down properly. Paper's ready Now what I want is the base wash. I'm just going to have quite a weak wash. And I could have done it with just wet paper, but I want to show you the reaction of the paints on a color. So I've got about just over half an inch or so of the blue, which is this French ultramarine by Winsor Newton, artist quality paints. Then in these little jar tops, I want the same amount of paint. So let's say about half an inch. See that's practically the same amount in each. And that's just what I want because we're not going to vary the amount of pigment. We're going to vary the amount of water. Firstly, we want one with, let's say, let's go for ten drops. And in the second one, we're going to have, I think 40 drops would do it. I'm going to stop at 30 actually. Then in the next one, I'm going to have 60 drops. Just to summarise, ten drops in there, 30 drops in there, and 50 drops in there. Then here I'm going to add just about half there. Now, I'm going to mix this with my little brush. Just ran to get some paper towel because I'm going to need to clean this, brush! then Clean Water, wipe it off with my paper towel. And then I'm going to mix this watery one first. Make sure I've got all of the color or pigment in the water. Make sure it dissolves properly, if it's on the side my brush I make sure that I get it off and mix it in. Okay. I'm going to clean up my brush again. then mix the second batch, again, making sure all of the pigment has dissolved. Again. Clean my brush you can see it's clean by how clean the water is that comes off it. Now, we're going to mix this one which has hardly any water in it. So it's very, very thick. I want to make sure that I don't leave the color on my brush. I'm even going to squeeze it off and clean my brush again. Okay, so now I want my big soft brush. And in this wash, I'm going to go over all of the paper. All of the squares , hadn't mixed the color very well. If you notice, I'm dragging the wash from the top squares onto the others because there was a little bit more pigment. And I want all of the squares the same. So the top ones that probably wetter because I started there every time. So I'm gonna go over these other ones as well. Right I think that's fine. Now, what does this exercise consist in? What we're going to do while this is still very wet, the top row, we're going to use different consistencies of paint. And we're just going to leave a mark, the bottom right-hand corner. And do the same on the next square. With the mixture that slightly thicker, clean off my brush again, and then use this, which is really quite dense. And now we're going to leave those and see how they react and come back to them in a second. In the meantime, we're going to let the paint dry off a little bit because I want the second row to be moist. So I'm going to look at it against the light and see how far the water is seeping in. Then when it's moist, we're going to do exactly the same thing. It's still quite wet. So I'm still waiting a couple of minutes maybe while I'm looking against the light, at my paper And I can see that the water's being absorbed because there are no puddles of water on the surface of the paper in that row. And it's starting to buckle a little bit. So that's how we want it, we want that pay part in that row moist. Now we're gonna repeat exactly the same thing. We're going to use the first batch of paint, which is very watery. then clean my brush again Act as if I've got a new clean and almost dry brush. Then we're going to use the second batch, which is the middle consistency. And do the same thing. Wash my brush, dry it off, and use the dense one. Now we're going to let that react and do its own thing. Then we're going to come back to the third row when the paper is damp, which is a little bit drier than moist, so another couple of minutes and then we'll come back to it. 3. Making Different Combinations Paint/Wetness: Well, I'm back again, and that really took quite a long time, actually. However, we've got to take into consideration that today is really quite a damp day. I do recommend that you take into consideration the type of temperature that you're working in if you're working outdoors or in the summer, if it's in the open, in the wine, of course, your paper is going to dry a lot quicker. I actually had time to go make a cup of coffee and put out my washing while I was waiting for the paper to become just damp! I can see that it's only damp and not moist because it has completely lost its shine. So the paper has gone quite dull. So all we're going to do is repeat exactly the same thing. Here we have our more watery mixture, going to clean my brush. Then. Medium consistency. Clean my brush again and then this more dense consistency, then make a mark. And now I'm going to let that do what it wants to do and I'm going to wait until the last row is completely dry. Well, the papers finally dry, took quite a long time, but now it's really quite dry. So we're going to repeat exactly the same thing first with our paint. That's a little bit wetter. Clean and brush. That's a little bit better. Clean up brush and now with the very thick paint, and I'm actually going to try and get a little bit more on my brush this time, there's a little bit more on here now than there was on the previous mark. And there we've got a really nice footprint of our brush. Now we're going to leave it to do its own thing and come back when everything is perfectly dry. The paper was taking forever to dry. so I gave it a helping hand with my hair dryer. In fact, there was a bit of a puddle in this one. And you can see the paint has gone out of the outline. But not to worry doesn't matter. What have we learned from this lesson? We've learned that there's a lot between wet on dry paper and wet on wet. It's a combination of the consistencies of paint and the dampness or wetness of your paper that you should take into consideration when you're doing your painting. So if we look at the first row, obviously it's the water that drags the pigment with it. So we can see in the first row here that there wasn't a lot of pigment in the amount of water that we had. The pigment has run out about here. Here there is more pigment in the water. So the pigment has actually expand a little bit more when it met the wetness of the paper underneath. It's a little bit more intense as well. But it also reached further here because there was a lot less water in the wet paper underneath with the pigment in the paint has spread a little bit and it's given this soft edge and it's really quite intense . In the second row here, we can see when we had moist paper, it has expanded the same amount, really. But the edge is a little bit different and there's not an awful lot of difference between this one and this one. Just just a little bit more uniform in this one. It's obviously more intense than this one again. It has expanded in a more regular type of manner and given us this soft edge here. Admittedly, I didn't have a lot of pigment on my paint brush, but you can see it's just left the footprint of the brush, but it has given a soft edge around it It hasn't expanded, but it does have a soft edge here. The paper was just damp so we've got a little bit of control of the outline here, because if you remember, this was the outline of the brush. So it has expanded a bit, but in a more controlled manner. Obviously here the paper was more wet because of the masking tape. So consider these things when you're doing a painting. Here there was a big puddle of pigment and the outline hasn't expanded a lot because the paper was just damp. It hasn't given a perfect footprint of the brush. We can still see where the brush was. It expanded very slightly here. I didn't have hardly any paint on my brush, but you can see that it hasn't expanded hardly at all. The pigment has stayed on top of the paper and we can see quite a good footprint of the brush itself. Now, our last row was perfectly dry paper, so we can see a perfect footprint of the brush. But it's not very intense because there wasn't a lot of pigment in the water here. It was between these two. We had a medium consistency of paint. And again, it's given us the perfect footprint and a very defined edge. And the colour is quite intense. On here we had hardly any water in our pigment, in our paint. So it's given us a perfect footprint and a hard edge. So, of course, there's lots of variations between the consistencies of paint. We could have had this one with a lot more water. We could have added a little bit more water to the middle one. And we could have had this as just a very, very watery wash with hardly any pigment at all, which is more or less what I did in this one. Again, the paper was exactly the same. This was wet. This was moist. This was damp and this was dry. The paint was slightly more watered down. I had about 60 drops in my first wash, 40 in the middle one and 20 drops in the more dense wash. So, again, you can see the difference. Here, the color has completely mingled. It's been dragged into the water, the two washes have completely dissolved into each other and it's given us this lovely, sort of almost iridescent, purplish color. We can see some pink, some blue, and you can hardly see where I laid my brush again here. Very similar because the paper was moist here. We didn't have a lot of control over where the pigment went, but the color was more intense. Of course, here we have more control, and the color was quite intense. Here, where we had a stronger mix of paint, we've got a little bit more of control, but it has still expanded and here a little bit less so. So this is all quite obvious now that we've done this experiment. But these are the things you really have to consider when you're doing your painting. Try to get your timing right. Figure out how you can use each of these situations in your painting. Obviously, if you want more control, then you're going to need a more dense paint on dry paper. But if you do want nice soft edges, then it's best, obviously, on wet/damp paper. I hope that's been of use to you. I wish that somebody had taught me this when I was just starting out in watercolor. If you did enjoy this and you want to learn more about watercolors, please check out my other lessons. And I look forward to seeing you again. Thank you, everybody. And please follow me!