Practicing Watercolor and Ink

I really like sketching with watercolor but damn is it hard. Watercolor is the inverse of other paints because it's transparent so you build paintings from light to dark, using the paper as your white "pigment". In other paint it's easier to go from dark to light because the pigment is opaque. The other thing making watercolor difficult is you have to controp the amount of water on thr paper vs. in your brush. If you don't it will run and bleed around.

The easiest way to get used to this is to paint with just ink and water or any transparent black paint. To get back into it I did a copy of a painting from a watercolor book:

I just used an ink that's fairly transparent and water soluble. I have a brush pen that makes it easy to paint, and then some little water brushes to change edges.

The way to think about these paintings is like this:

1. Identify every shape that's whitest white. Paint everything else with a very wash of light gray.
2. Identify the shapes that stay lighy gray, paint everything else mid gray. Now you have your whites, light gray, mid-gray. It might be done here.
3. Now identify all the dark shapes, paint those in. You should be done at this point.

The advantage of watercolor is you can control the edges on these shapes if you dry the paper or not between each layer of paint. If you have more water then the edges will be soft and out of focus. If you dry it then the edges will be hard and in focus.

Do these kind of monochrome paintings for a while and you'll get the hang of water as an edge control and using layers of watercolor to build the painting.

Next I tried a few with color, using mostly the same process. But, one thing I always never really figured out how work pen and ink into my watercolors so I tried that too. First try:

It's like, some rocks and stuff. I don't know. Let's try that again:

It's some more rocks and an orange bush. Sure. That's...close enough. Ok something with dark black so I can use the pen and ink without it being weird:

Nothing beats backlight on trees for dark silhouette shapes. Those are birds or mosquitos or something annoying and tiny.

I really like ink for drawing and a brush pen to do monochrome paintings, but still not sure about it in watercolors.

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