Why watercolour

Sunset at Ballina

Watercolour is a unique medium to work with.

It is transparent which means once you put dark colours down and cover the white of your page you can’t come back and put light colours over the top to restore highlights.

The light in watercolours comes from light reflecting on the paper. Cover that and you darken your work, that can work to your advantage as well of course. Painters constantly fight the going out of the light in their works.

There is a special white you can daub or paint with, but in some circles that technically means you can’t say it’s watercolour, and some competitions restrict it. I use it very occasionally as many painters do, unless they’re absolute purists. You can also sometimes wet the paint and lift it with a semi-dry brush. It is still hard to get back to pure white that way and some paints stain and can’t be lifted.

Side note: Watercolour and gouache are not the same. They are water-based mediums but gouache has the advantage of being opaque. It is a little chalky (usually) but the benefit is you can put light colours onto darks. Sometimes watercolour and gouache are mixed together to allow for a greater range in technique, and it can be used to restore lost highlights. Again, purists won’t allow it but it’s reasonably common and can accentuate a painting. I do use it from time to time. As an example, the painting next to this text here is 100% watercolour - no whites or gouache.

With watercolour, there’s also limited ability to rework a piece once the pigment has stained the paper, and even less so once it’s dried. That means painting in watercolour can be a ‘now or never’ test of courage, anxiety inducing and downright nerve wracking and huge fun all at once. Every stroke can be additive and make a piece go from meh to great. And any stroke can bring you undone.

Leaving paper to show in your work gives sparkle and a sense of freshness, movement and energy. To do that means you have to anticipate it as you plan your painting. Scratching paint off with a sharp edge is common practice to reintroduce sparkles. Again, if you look at the horizon of this painting, that white shoreline is a scratch line done with a razor.

Watercolours are usually built up through a series of washes. You lay down your lightest colours. You let that dry and then you add your next layer and so on. You have to contend with how transparent paints interact as they lay over each other, how to preserve lights and not ‘overwork’ the painting.

The application of paint in watercolour changes depending on the effects you are trying to create. As a water-based pigment if you put it onto already wet paper it will behave differently to putting it on dry paper. Wet-on-wet gives you soft, diffused blends with no hard edges. Wet on dry gives you hard edges and more control over your pigment. The wateriness of the pigment applied will also determine the hue that you end up with. Watercolour will dry paler than how it looks wet.

This is a simplification, but it means that you have to keep your paint-to-water consistency in your palette under control, your paper wetness constantly managed to match the effects you are trying to create while also working with what happens to your paint when it touches paper. Sometimes the painting you have in mind is not what you end up with - at all. Often it’s much better.

Watercolour is such a powerful medium because you really can’t make it do exactly what you want. It is almost impossible for even a skilled artist to recreate one of their own watercolour paintings, let alone someone else’s. The variables are immeasurable. Humidity, paint batch, water impurities, brush cleanliness, the light in the room, how much sleep the artist has had, the paper - they all conspire to produce a very strange kind of magic.

What you get with watercolour is an artistic expression which borders on magic (I kid you not). The boldness and energy of the artist shows through, so too does breathing, patience, calmness and ‘trusting’ that each stroke you make is as it should be. The desire to fiddle and ‘correct’ brushstrokes in watercolour is what often ruins them, taking away the bright colours and liveliness. The greatest watercolourists see possibilities as each stroke goes down, try to minimise their brushstrokes and let ‘the paint do the work’ rather than forcing their vision onto the paper. It’s counter-intuitive but by ‘dancing with the paint’ the results can be incredibly rewarding.

It’s not a medium for the faint-hearted, it’s not technically easy to master, but it is the closest to connecting to real magic I’ve ever felt.