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Paint your watercolor scenes at a slight angle - it's easier and effective

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mikeville
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2 years agoSteemit3 min read

The other day I did a class with some younger students and they were having problems with the amount of paint that they were putting on their completed ink outlines. This is a common problem with children as they tend to be impatient and will end up putting entirely too much paint on their scenes and it ends up saturating the paper and also the colors bleed to other parts of the picture unintentionally.

While I can't force an impatient person to magically have better time-management I have found that if I can convince people to use this one piece of advice it results in less paint getting slopped on the piece because one has to wait for the paint to "set" before moving on. This doesn't mean that the entire process is going to take ages, but by placing the paper at a slight angle it encourages the user to wait for a minute to see how the paint and water is going to react. By using this simple trick users are encouraged to wait for just a second to see how the water and paint work together.

I have found that this method encourages artists to take their time and normally we get good results.

you'll notice that I tend to start at the top and work my way down using this process and while I do deviate from the top-down approach every now and then that mostly I stick to it unless I am filling in all of one color before washing the brush.

I tell my students to not worry about paint bleeding into the wrong section because you can always paint over it later but this is only true if someone doesn't use too much paint at a time. You see, this is one of the downsides of using watercolors: It isn't really possible to paint over some colors if you use too much of it.

Painting at a slight, perhaps 10-20% angle helps to enforce slowing down a bit in the overall process. At about the 6 minute mark you'll notice that I put the angle up to a nearly 90 degree angle. This is when I was coloring the darker trees. During this part of the process I am using significantly less water in my mix and this is when you have to be the most careful. If you paint outside of the area with this much concentration of paint in your water mix, the paint is going to have to stay where it lands.

Even if you do make a mistake during this portion of the process, resist the urge to try to soak it up off the paper: In years of doing this I have found that this NEVER works and you will just make a mess of the entire scene... perhaps even ruin it. Embrace your little mistakes! This is what can make your work unique in the end. Some of the best artists of all time thought that their mistakes ruined their works when in the end that was precisely what made it unique and interesting to the rest of the world.


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