I’ve had a love-hate relationship with watercolor when it comes to painting. I’ve been painting since I was a kid, and it’s always been my primary choice of paint. However, it’s always given me mixed results. The unpredictability of the paint and the water is what makes it hard, and unless you’ve put in the hours practicing and mastering all the techniques, you’ll always struggle. I certainly haven’t put in those hours, but I dabble nonetheless.
Saying watercolor is hard 100% of the time is probably not correct either. What probably gives people (and myself) the most pain is the wet-on-wet method, where you run a wet brush across your paper before you start painting, and then the entire painting happens while the paper continues to be wet. This method specifically is a nightmare for me because I haven’t yet understood how much I should wet the paper and how quickly I have to move through the painting to keep the effect going.
The effects in wet-on-wet are too wild and uncontrollable. Like this one below, where my perfectly fine ink sketch was destroyed by a flood of wet-on-wet effect that leaked outside the flower. Although I loved the effect itself, I couldn’t contain it.
And furthermore, the dreaded CAULIFLOWER effect, which I’ve now learned happens when there is too much water, occurs to me a lot, unfortunately! It truly feels like a chemical or oil spill, or something happening on your paper. I hate when this happens.
And when I try to be too conservative with the wetness of the paper, the strokes turn out too dry. This would have been fine if I had intended to paint in a wet-on-dry or dry-on-dry method. However, as you can see below, those clouds don’t look like clouds at all. They just look like brush strokes, which defeats the purpose of painting.
At least I like the bottom third of this sunset that I attempted to paint tonight.
Anyways. This wasn’t a venting post about how watercolor has been my friend and nemesis all my life. Maybe it was. I think it was.
In the next post, I might just share what I’m actually good at – plain old sketching. Master of the shades of grey.
Good night folks!