Ultimate guide to water control - beginner s watercolor tips

Hello, hello! So today we are going to talk about water and I'm going to give you all of my tips for water control when using watercolor paints. Different brushes will hold different amounts of water, so mop brushes or large round brushes will hold a lot of water versus the thinner synthetic haired brushes. I start to paint and my palette is dry. I will dip my brush into the water, drag it along the sides to remove heavy droplets and then come to my palette and start mixing the paint and the water together. And if I think it needs more pigment I will add more pigment, I will add more water if I want it more watered down, but just remember this more pigment equals a darker color, more water equals a lighter color, and depending on what you're painting you're going to want more water or more pigment. So this consistency of pink that I have made right here is what I would consider middle of the road wash. It's not super washed out or light and it's also not super pigmented. For this next wash I've added water to the same color and I'm going to paint it on here and you can see that it's the same color but now it's a light pink, so if you ever need a lighter color just add water. If you need a darker color like up here add more pigment. So I add pigment to my wash but then I can also add pigment straight from the well. So adding water or adding pigment will completely change one color into a lighter or darker value which is great because then you don't need multiple pinks, you can just get one pink for your palette. So now I'm going to show you the four brushes from earlier and how much water and paint they can hold. This is a Polina Bright round size 2 brush and I am just taking a medium wash and going across the paper with it. This is a DaVinci size 2 mop brush and mop brushes hold a lot of water and paint. Knowing how much paint your brush can hold is really important and we will go over why in just a little bit. This brush is a Master's Touch 3 8 flat and last we have a Princeton round brush size 4. Knowing how much water and paint each of your brushes can hold is super important because it will help you determine which brush you should use for a project. In this example I'm going to show you the difference between a mop brush and a small round brush in painting a large space. So this is the DaVinci mop brush size 2 and I only dipped it into the paint one time it held a ton of paint and I was able to paint a really large space with paint to spare. And this is the Princeton round brush size 4 and as you can see it doesn't hold a ton of paint and I have to go back to the palette a lot. So when you're painting a large area you'll want a bigger fuller mop brush. When you're painting a smaller area you don't want so much paint and you'll want a smaller round brush. Anytime you have too much water or too much paint on your brush dab it with a paper towel. This is especially helpful when you're wanting to go back into a wash and you don't want to change the consistency of it. It's really important to have the right amount of wash made up on your palette before you start painting an area because if you add more pigment or more water to that area it will create what's called blooms. So you can see I've painted this little area and then I'm going to add some water to the pigment on my palette and then I'm going to paint next to this purple area again and you'll see because this spot that I've painted has more water it begins to bloom into the solid area of purple that I've already painted. Now this can be a great effect if you're trying to paint that but if you're trying to paint something that's totally the same gradient you don't want to do that. So in this example I'm going to show you how I'm painting that purple area again but instead of adding more water or more pigment I am taking from the same wash and I can add to the side of this area and it remains very even and stable, no blooms. If you do accidentally create a bloom let me show you how to fix it. So here I've quote-unquote accidentally created a bloom to show you and what you do is you just take that wash that's new that's more watery and you drag it along the area that you've painted and hopefully your area is still wet or this won't work but then it all becomes back to even again with the new more watery wash. I also did a little experiment to show you how quickly your paint will dry and how long you have to add colors to blend. So this is adding some purple blue right away this is after 30 seconds still pretty wet this is after 60 seconds one minute this is after 90 seconds and you'll see this is when it's starting to dry and then two minutes. If my initial pink wash was more watery it would make it so that I had a longer time to blend those colors in because it would still be wet after two minutes. My final tip is about bleeding so both of these pink and purple washes are more watery and you can see they have a lot of blending together but it's pretty even as far as how they blend together. This purple and pink wash are more pigmented and when washes are more pigmented they really don't blend into each other very well. If you want a lot of blending you need a highly pigmented wash and a super watery wash together. So the pink is highly pigmented the purple is more watery and what happens is the watery wash ends up attracting the pigment into it. And those are my best tips and tricks for water control with watercolor paints. If you have any questions leave them below I would love to answer them. I hope this helps you a ton with your watercolor projects and I hope you have a fantastic day. Bye!