I think the biggest missing piece is find a local art store. Local indie places are amazing, but even a chain like Dick Blick is great. Even a craft store can work, but make that your last option. The benefit is that the employees are usually artists as well and can answer questions. Its great to ask "is this $100 thing really better than this $15 dollar thing?"
Watercolor Basics
61–70 of 79 posts
Re: Watercolor Basics
#62Is it me or anyone else seeing more and more articles that include lists/how to’s/procedures being shared on GitHub?
Re: Watercolor Basics
#63This article contains what I would call unorthodox advice. Here are my own recommendations regarding tools (I won't give advice how to paint, unlike the OP): you will need 5 tools only: - colours: get a Lukas (preferred) or Schmincke set, a box with 12 half-bricks of colours will last for a long time and provide plenty of choice, 50-70 €; - 2-3 brushes: only natural horse hair, one medium, one thinker and if you can…
Most who will try this will probably drop it after 2-3 paintings. So it's wasteful to start with the high quality stuff.
No, because otherwise you will be frustrated with the difficulties arising from the bad materials. Watercolor is hard, don’t make it even harder on yourself.
Beside it’s cheap compare to most hobby, even with quality stuffs.
Re: Watercolor Basics
#64Those choices are bad: watercolor supplies need to have be of high quality to not frustrate the painter. Otherwise you'll have bad result (destroyed paper for example, oversaturated or muddy color) and will have to fight every bit. When I was studying illustration, our teacher would advise us to avoid those kind of kit and paper. I've tried the one from children: that's not a pleasant experience. Last thing: watercol…
Yeah, "brush quality doesn't matter" is horrid advice. My watercolor teacher required us to buy only one brush, a pricey squirrel hair. The difference between that and a cheap acrylic brush is so great they shouldn't even have the same name.
Came to say the same, though there was a lot of bad advice in the thing.
It isn't that brush quality always matters: I'm not as concerned with brush quality when I use acrylics. Watercolor, however, it matters. Upgrading my brushes to Kolinsky sable brushes seriously improved my watercolors. It doesn't need to be sable: Folks have good success with others too. They do need some quality, though.
Re: Watercolor Basics
#65Those choices are bad: watercolor supplies need to have be of high quality to not frustrate the painter. Otherwise you'll have bad result (destroyed paper for example, oversaturated or muddy color) and will have to fight every bit. When I was studying illustration, our teacher would advise us to avoid those kind of kit and paper. I've tried the one from children: that's not a pleasant experience. Last thing: watercol…
I don't read this is a "watercoloring guide for experts" but more as a "so you've seen those children's watercoloring books at walmart and you want to take things a step further".
It is still bad advice. I've spent some years giving advice to beginners, and some of these are simply going to make things more difficult at first.
Re: Watercolor Basics
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it Red/Yellow/Blue? I believe we were lied to in elementary school — Magenta/Yellow/Cyan are the real pigment primaries. I always wondered why when we mixed blue and yellow it made for a really muddy green.
RGB are the primary colors used in additive color mixing, CMYK are used as the primary colors for subtractive color mixing which is used in offset printing and similar processes.
In reality, artists often use different base colors anyway. One way to do it is to have 2 versions of the base colors, one warm, one cold. The reason is that for example a greenish blue like Cyan would make it harder to mix vivid violets (by adding a red on the other direction of the color wheel). So you use a greenish blue (Cyan) and a redish blue (e.g. Aquamarine), a blueish red (e.g. Magenta) and a yellow-ish red, and so on.
Re: Watercolor Basics
#67Too opinionated advice on an even worse medium. Please do yourself and the rest of us a favor and open a blog. Reading an article about watercolor basics which is basically a wall of text without a single picture is a pita. Also some of the advice is just plain wrong. Paper should be the number one thing you shouldn't skimp on and yet you recommend buying cheap/on sale.
It isn't horrible advice: Good paper is expensive and if you can buy it on sale, you most definitely should.
And while good paper will absolutely make it easier to learn, it doesn't need to be the best paper. Just understand that the cheapest paper is usually worthless and that the next step up will cause a few struggles. I'd rather have cheap paper than bad brushes, though. (I learned on thin paper, some of it cheap)
Re: Watercolor Basics
#68As others here are pointing out, there are a lot of points here that won't hold up for more experienced artists. For example, on brushes: "a medium round (the pointy but wide-ish one) is all you need" This depends entirely on technique and what you want to do. Trying to do consistent, smooth lines using a round brush? Good luck.
"Trying to do consistent, smooth lines using a round brush? Good luck."
It just takes practice. As long as it is the proper size for the line you are making and it holds a decent point, though, it isn't so much of an issue. Rigger brushes are long-bristled, thin, and round and used for lines, after all.
Re: Watercolor Basics
#69On practical how to: 1. Keep two water reservoirs for cleaning your brushes. One for warm colors and one for cool. (This prevents muddiness in your palette). 2. Knowing when to let the layers on your paper dry before further progress is vital. 3. Carry pigment from the bricks to your palette, don't mix pigments in the bricks. On technique: 1. Experiment adding water to a pigment on your palette (More water == thinner…
This all seems like sound(er) advice. On color : I recently realised (or read somewhere) about the simplest color wheel- if you divide a circle into 6 segments and paint the primaries : {R, Y, B} in non-neighbouring segments, then the ones in between are the secondaries: {R+Y=O, R+B=P, Y+B=G}. Then if you combine primaries and the 'opposite' secondary, you get brown/grey like colors. Also, I get quite good combinatio…
If you want to get things right, I suggest looking at Peter Donahue's Colordisk. He has several great explainers up on Tiktok (sic.), and he has several variants of his Colordisk freely available (his URL shortening, not mine):
Re: Watercolor Basics
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
This all seems like sound(er) advice. On color : I recently realised (or read somewhere) about the simplest color wheel- if you divide a circle into 6 segments and paint the primaries : {R, Y, B} in non-neighbouring segments, then the ones in between are the secondaries: {R+Y=O, R+B=P, Y+B=G}. Then if you combine primaries and the 'opposite' secondary, you get brown/grey like colors. Also, I get quite good combinatio…
If you want to get things right, I suggest looking at Peter Donahue's Colordisk. He has several great explainers up on Tiktok (sic.), and he has several variants of his Colordisk freely available (his URL shortening, not mine): https://bit.ly/3gczeBz
I never realised the colour wheel can be navigated using the ab coordinates from Lab space! That makes so much sense.
I've had trouble remembering what the ab coordinates mean, but if I just imagine them on the colour wheel it's obvious that a goes from torquoise-ish to its complement magenta and b goes orthogonal to that, from purple-blue to its complement yellow.
Thanks for linking!