How I Fell in Love with Watercolor
In last week’s blog post I wrote “Once I discovered how easy it is for me to mix watercolors to make any color in the universe that I want to create, I was sold on the medium.” Today I’m going to delve into a few of the reasons that watercolor is my favorite art medium.
Dipping a Toe in the World of Watercolor
I discovered how much I enjoy watercolor when I took my first watercolor class—a Color Mixing class at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s Art Institute. Over the course of this class I painted over 1800(!) samples of color, all created from just 13 watercolors on my palette. Here’s one page of my color samples from that class:
Our assignment was to paint the square on the left side of a row with one of the colors on our palette, paint the square on the right side of a row with another color on our palette, and then mix the two colors together to fill in the 7 squares in-between, creating an even transition from the color on the left to the color on the right. This isn’t as easy as one might think because certain colors, like Winsor Blue and Winsor Green (also known as phthalos, pronounced “thay-lows”) shown above, are very strong and can easily overpower other colors. A little goes a long way!
Because of this, I learned you can’t just mix two colors at a 1:1 ratio to get a third color halfway in-between the two, and that it works best to add the darker or more intense color little by little to the other color.
Glazing
Another reason I love watercolor is that watercolor is transparent. Why transparency is important became crystal clear 😁 when I learned about a watercolor technique called glazing.
“Glazing” means painting a layer of watercolor on top of another layer of watercolor. The result is a mix of the two colors. For example, If I paint blue on top of yellow the end result is some shade of green. Glazing is an easy way to gradually build up color on the page, to make subjects darker, or more blue, or more green, or more…you get the idea. I glaze allllllll the time so I can get the exact color I want.
The glazing chart above was another class assignment in which we painted each color in our palette on top of every other color in our palette, to have a record of the results of glazing. It also serves as a very abbreviated color mixing chart.
Sonoran Desert Spring Color Wheel
After my Color Mixing class I felt empowered by my new color mixing and glazing knowledge, so I created this color wheel to showcase Spring colors here in the Sonoran Desert.
Diving into the World of Watercolor
The next watercolor class I took was a Watercolor I class in which we learned different techniques for applying and using watercolor. Honestly, parts of this class were daunting for me, and I created this sketchnote documenting my experience taking the class. As you see, the story of my Watercolor I class had a happy ending and I’ve been enjoying using watercolor ever since!
After this class I felt even more empowered to dive into the world of watercolor. A number of the techniques I learned in this class are ones I’ve used ever since, in almost every piece of art I create—techniques including washes (flat, graded, and mingled), glazing, masking, and lifting.
A Little Color Humor
I’ll end this with a color-related quote and comic about watercolor! Here’s one of my favorite quotes about color…
“I never met a color I didn't like.”
~ Dale Chihuly, glass artist extraordinaire
…and here’s a favorite Off the Mark comic about watercolor.