.Playing with different colors mixed with water in different ratios to make shades of different brightness and intensities give pleasant feeling filled with ecstasy and energy. Artists who love splashes of water on paper or canvas, or all respective buyers who love patterns created by watercolor paints, get ready to loose yourselves in the world of watercolor paintings.
History of watercolors
Watercolor paintings are extremely old, tracing back to the cave paintings of paleolithic Europian era. They have been used for manuscript illustration since Egyptian times but more especially in the European Middle Ages. However, its history as an art begins with the Renaissance period.
Many factors contributed in spreading of watercolor paintings during the 18th century, significantly in England. Among elites and aristocrates, watercolor paintings was one of the pointer of a good educational backgrounds; mapmakers, military officers, and engineers found its usefulness in highlighting demographical representation, field geology, and for illustrating other public works.
From the late 18th century through the 19th century, watercolors were used as the basic document from which collectible landscape or tourist engravings were developed, and hand-painted watercolor originals or copies of famous sell paintings contributed to many upper class art portfolios.
This way the era of watercolor paintings slowly and steadily gained pace, making its way from 18th to 19th century and finally progressing rapidly in 20th and 21st centuries.
Watercolor paintings pre-requisites
- Attempting painting on regular paper or tuff cardboard is of no use, and mixed-media sketchbooks may or may not work.
depending on the quantity of paint and/or water one is using.
Suggestion is only doing research to find the brand of watercolor paper having relatively good quality and affordable price to start off with. With experience, one will start seeing whether one prefers thicker, thinner, cold press, hot press papers. - Be pre-programmed for the colors one is trying to use in the painting. Decide before starting with watercolor paintings which colors one is throwing on in his painting. This will avoid confusion and time lagging.
- Begin with any transparent paint mixture that is light and watery.
This gives time and control to the artist as he gets to know the medium he is playing with. - Understanding of the color wheel is highly required from the artist side and the knowledge of what happens when different colors are mixed together . Be very careful while creating darkest hues because they usually requires mixing very different colors together. When creating these mixtures, one should make sure to prepare them. Test them out before actually applying them in their paintings to avoid problems at later stage!
- Cleaning brushes in between applying different colors. It is common misconception that watercolor pigments are easily removed from paint brushes. Do not take much time to get completely off the brush.
If one is using the same paintbrush with very different colors, some gentle blotting on a rag after rinsing.
. Also, swivel your brushes in your water gently.
- Replace water frequently while attempting watercolor paintings. It’s important to leave laziness and replace water when it starts to get murky because this can affect your colors and muddy up your work.
