How To Make A Watercolor Painting--Ch. 2

COLOR THEORY

 Color is simply…well…actually there have been a ton of thicker books written about color. For our purposes, color is what you are trying to copy from life onto an empty, terrifying little piece of expensive paper, with no guarantee that you’ll ever show the result to anyone, using only some "color juice" in a tube, a little brush and some water.

ONE WORD...COLOR WHEEL

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 OK, that's two words, but if I had used one word it would be this: triad. Believe it or not, you are going to use the theory of the color wheel and the color triad to make your little paintings. The color wheel is easy: It consists of three primary colors (yellow, red and blue) spaced equally around a “wheel.” Next come the three secondary colors, located between the primary colors, and created by mixing the two primary colors on either side of them. In other words, red and blue make violet; red and yellow make orange; and yellow and blue make green.

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Never mind for now that you can’t get every green or every orange or every violet you’d like to get from mixing primaries. The reason we call the primaries chosen in this book a “triad” is because they have become known over the years to artists as producing the nearest misses in trying to acheive mixes of all the colors. They are particularly good at getting there, especially with the help of the few secondary colors we threw in to our shopping list in the previous chapter.

GETTING STARTED

Basically you are about to play with your paints before ever trying to paint that incredibly picturesque barn down the road. Besides, so many bad paintings have been done of that barn that it will probably be happy to wait for you. What I would like you to do, and what you are going to love doing, is squirt a little paint in each holder of your palette as indicated in appendix 2, fill up your old container with water, rip the shrink wrap off your watercolor pad, and paint about 10 juicy 3” or 4” wide squares of each color in your palette onto your paper. Do one with a little water and mostly paint, then do the opposite, then try more and less water, then try adding water to the paper and dropping paint in. In other words, get acquainted with the color and feel and transparency and opacity and other surprising characteristics of each color. You are going to waste a lot of paper, but there is no other way to learn, and your brain will be soaking up information you are not even aware of. But most importantly, you will look like you know what you are doing and nobody will be able to criticize your squares. They just are what they are.

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How To Make A Watercolor Painting--Ch. 1

INTRODUCTION

1-This is the shortest, easiest to read, best book ever written on watercolor. The idea is to get you over the hump and painting within minutes. Why? Because you are a procrastinator and you know it (or you wouldn’t have bought this book…or let your friend give it to you) So start reading and I want to see that paint fly. Ready, go.

WHY SHOULD I WATERCOLOR?

Because it’s a really cool thing to do, and its fun, and you’ll feel really good about yourself. Plus it helps you see the world around you and become one with the moment. And did I mention you’ll have a little painting to be proud of and keep for your grandkids?

 WATERCOLOR IS A TOOL

Watercolor is a tool for seeing…and communicating…and other stuff, too. If you think of it as a tool, you are less likely to think of it as something precious and hard-to-do and any of the other excuses you’ve come up with before buying this book. On the other hand, if you do think of it as a tool you are more likely to lend it to a friend who will never return it, or leave it out in the rain at a friend’s house and get your dad all mad.

WHAT YOU NEED

You are going to need water, paint, a palette, a brush, and some paper. If you don’t have these already, go get them at an art store. What helps make this book so short is that I don’t tell you which brushes or colors or paper to get.

 Just kidding…see appendix A where I tell you what to get. These handy appendices have been added otherwise you could read this entire book in the store without actually having to buy a copy.

• BRUSH: get a nice brush with a nice pointy tip and around a size 8.
• PAINTS: get a tube of cadmium yellow (T), yellow ochre, alizarin crimson (T), cadmium red, French ultramarine blue (T), Prussian blue, burnt umber, sepia, winsor violet, hooker’s green, and sap green.
• PAPER: Buy a small watercolor “block” which means a pad of watercolor paper that is sealed along the edges so the pad keeps the top sheet from warping. Get a small size for starters, say about 6 x 9”.
• PALETTE: Get something with enough little paint holding areas for the paints above, and with bigger, shallows areas for mixing the color you want.

to be cont'd.



How To Make A Watercolor Painting

Here is a little book I made for my kids that explains the basics of making your first watercolor, from what stuff you'll need to use, to what a "triad" is, to how to mix colors and build up transparent layers and make your first watercolor. It's a work in progress and very basic, but hope you enjoy and please let me know your comments.