Beginning a Watercolor Painting with Nancy Couick - Part 2 of 5

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The beauty of watercolors is that it's transparent. The light goes through your paint, reflects off the surface of the paper and gives this gorgeous translucent glow unlike any other medium.

Again I'm blending this up to give me a little more value. I'm going to move on up here. One thing you need to know and remember very well is that you can't do two areas that are next to each other and damp. If you do you'll end up with one big area instead of 2 little areas.

You want to treat each section as its own painting and that also keeps you from worrying about stuff. I'm putting in color here right next to this. Again, start out away from the color with moisture, and let it do its own thing. Most of what happens is after you put your brush down. It can sometimes be frustrating but often very rewarding.

Try not to keep the paper towel wadded up in your hand. When you make a mistake the tendency is to go in and fix it very quickly. Then you've pushed the paint into the paper and it won't come up. When you apply the towel gently it comes off easily.

Anytime I'm going to paint a new subject I'll try to study it as much as possible. In these it's a case of the darkest areas where it first comes out at the base of the rose bud. The darkest color is here, dense and very thick, and as it comes into the light it gets lighter.

Really studying light and how it affects objects and how we perceive objects is really important.

The first reason you paint is to have fun. Take a class, take a workshop. It's more fun when you're with other people and you get that feedback from other students. Often they ask questions that you forgot to.

I'm doing little triangles - dark at the bottom and light at the top.

This petal comes up and folds out. The light hits it and it reads as kind of flat but that's not what I want to do. We want that to appear to curve back. Put a little blob here - it's called shade and fade. You want to catch this and pull it out to the end gradually.

You don't want to outline the whole thing because on the end you'll end up with a solid red. The way we contour things in watercolors is just that - color value and shading.

The biggest tendency is to overwork things. It's more of a layering process.

If you look at areas like this they're slightly disjointed. All it takes is one stroke to pull all that together. I'm going to take some alizarin crimson and run a line that connects all of those. Then I'll come back and soften the outside edge. What that does is that all of a sudden they're underneath this petal and things make more sense. Now this is almost three-dimensional.

We can do one more step called dry brushing. I look at my picture and I see some texture here. So I'm going to put in a couple little spots and I'm going to soften these out. The important thing to remember when you're painting nature is that if it looks too perfect it doesn't look like nature. Very few straight lines.

There's also a little sliver of light down here, but I have too much water. The best way to solve that is to dry your brush off, lay it on there and pick up the excess water. Then you're free to continue.

I don't know if you've noticed or not, there's a small cut in this petal and the light is shining through to create this shape.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• shade and fade
• color value
• watercolor tips
• watercolor tutorial
• nancy couick
• cheap joes art stuff
• painting rosebud
• three dimensional
• dry brushing

[MsPlantBuddy]

Just a question about what color you added and mixed with the Aliz. Crimson? It looked like it might have been Burnt Sienna. Anyway, the mixture looked so natural on the rose bud. Thanks.

[ScreeminMeeme]

Nancy....superb teaching! Your explanations are clear and sensible and reflect how I think about watercolor. I've appreciated all of your tutorials and have learned much from them. Thank you and I anticiplate any new videos you make.

[disneynazar]

you know, those oil painters... hahahaha I guess that's how all artists think of arts that are close to their own.

[jminucelli]

Nice work, very creative.

Congratulations de Brasil!

Roberto

[pumkin54]

I wish i could be in your class. I learned a lot and am inspired just from this video. I imagine what i could learn from an entire class. You seem like a great teacher.

[Airave]

Great series! Thanks Nancy and CJ

for sharing. You are inspirational! :)