Figuring out watercolors

More than a month since I posted any sketches here. Crap.

I watched a video Danny Gregory made, and figured out a bit of what I’d been doing wrong in watercolors. See, those nylon waterbrushes? They kinda suck for scraping paint off the watercolor pans and plopping it onto the palettes. Which means I’d been just pulling color off the pans and painting it right on the paper, which works okay for small regions of pure color, but crappy for mixing or covering large regions.

I picked up one of those Cotman portable brushes on sale at Pearl a while back, and a folding water container at Hudson County Art Supply, and today I tried using the waterbrush just as a clean water source, dripping it down onto the pans and palettes, and using the Cotman to grab color and paint, and mixed up batches of color on my palette, and it worked pretty well. This is a guy who was sitting near at the next table in the coffee shop. I’ve still got a lot of practicing ahead of me, but I can see a way forward. And now I’m psyched to try some watercolor techniques with acrylics.