Have you always been inspired to try out watercolors but have always been afraid of its unpredictability or just didn’t know where to start? This post is just for you! We are going to help you choose the correct materials and make your first steps in discovering this art material.
📄Paper
Watercolor techniques require you to use a lot of water, so it is crucial to choose a correct paper that can withstand it. We recommend using a specialized watercolor paper between 200-300 gsm. There are 2 types depending on your style and technique: hot pressed and cold press.
🖌️Brushes
There are two types of brushes used in watercolor painting – natural hair (red sable or mink) that hold a lot of water and pigment but are really unwieldy; Synthetic that hold less water but can be incredibly precise. To begin, choose a bigger natural hair brush to fill in big areas and paint gradients, and have a smaller synthetic brush to paint details and small areas.
🎨Watercolor paints
Of course, we can’t ignore the paints themselves. Watercolor paints respond extremely well to mixing, so even a small palette will be enough to start, you will be able to mix all the other colors easily.
You can purchase a starter palette that is already made for you, around 6-12 colors is more than enough to start with. Later you can buy single pallets or tubes of the colors you need and collect your own palette for your illustrations and paintings.
⚙️Techniques
There are many techniques in watercolor: wet on wet, wet on dry etc. Your main goal is to add a lot of water and keep the brush wet at all times. Scroll the carousel to see an example of a technique you can try.
Try to avoid using white at first, the beauty of watercolor is in its transparency, which means the paper showing through is essentially your white. Keep adding more thin layers of paint to get more depth and vibrancy and make sure that the previous layer is completely dry.
We hope this will help you to start with, and who knows, maybe you have just discovered your new favorite art media.🧡
Cover: @king_fisher_arts
Text: @airichan_cos@king_fisher_arts
