Some people asked me how I do watercolour paintings. I was actually trained in watercolour when I was a kid by going to weekend art classes before I learned digital painting. So, I've put together a quick tutorial based on the latest Batgirl watercolour painting I'm doing.
Keep in mind, this is just my way of painting. Find what works best for you. No real right or wrong way.
Quick Watercolor Tutorial
1. Prepare you materials. You’ll need a water container(anyone will do, at least about the size of a Instant Noodle Cup), watercolortubes(I prefer paste tube instead of the dried paint cakes), brushes, paint palette, and a piece of cloth. Pentel watercolour from Japan or Alpha watercolours from Korea work best for me. Good quality.
2. Positioning of your materials is important before you begin work. If you are right handed, your water jar, paint palette and brushes should be positioned on your right. If your left handed, then, position them on the left. This is to avoid zig-zagging across your artblock or canvas while you are painting to reach for water and colour. In which case, you could accidentally drip paint or water onto your art & ruin it.
3. When you have everything ready, take out the essential colours that will be used for your painting based on the subject of your art. You don’t need to squeeze out all the colours at once.
4. Work from light to dark for watercolour. It’s very important to always bear in mind that in watercolour painting you only get 1 chance to do things right. Once you mess up, you can't paint over it like acrylic paint. You can salvage it a little and touch up(I’ll tell you later on this), but the best is get it right the first time. If you accidentally smudged red or black onto what was supposed to be a lighter yellow or blue, it’s very hard and usually impossible to get back that light colour for that spot. In Batgirl’s case, since the entire costume is in shades of black, I chose to work on the skin first. Which is the face. Start with light colour. I mixed vermillion, yellow and white to create the skin tone. Usually I would prefer to use pink+white+yellow. But my Pentel 12 tubes box set doesn’t have it, so I chose vermillion.
5. How to mix paint and how much water to dilute the paint? You don’t need to squeeze out a lot of paint and mix a few palettes circles of paint with them. So, I seldom have “puddles” of diluted paint on my palette. Just blots of paint pastes everywhere. I just squeeze out small amounts like maybe about 0.5cm on the palette. Then I dip my brush into the water jar, bring out some water and mix the paint, I do this on vermillon, then I draw a bit more water by quickly dip and remove from water jar, and go to yellow on the palette, mix in circular motion. I then do a quick test on a piece of artblock paper to see if I mixed the right colour(for me, I like to test like this to see if the colour is rightly mixed to my liking) If it’s too yellow, I dab my brush on the vermillion paste, test gain, then dab on the white paste to lighten it to my liking. It’s important that your brush does not hold too much water. Too much water, when you put your brush to paper, the paper will absorb it and if too much, it will ruin the paper. It has to be just right. Too little, your paint won’t flow, as it’s too dry. So, if I were painting the eyeballs or lips, small areas, I just have enough water & paint so that it flows smoothly. If not you might get a droplet of water standing on the paper & eventually the paper will soak it, and if too much, that part of the paper will break.
6. IMPORTANT RULES for Painting Girl’s Face. On a girl’s face, for watercolour, you cannot have too many shadows and lines. So, I try not to put too much tones and shadows on it. Just some darker tones on cheeks, nose, around eyes. After that, leave it alone, don’t try to add more shadows and darker tones. Usually that won’t look good. First put in the light colour, then darker tones. For highlights, try to leave the white of paper for that. That works best. When you mix watercolour white, no matter how thick you mix, it won’t be as white as the paper when you try to cover it on top of a skin tone.
7. Painting in layers. One thing about watercolour is the translucent effect it can give. You can overlay on top of another painted colour to give it a tint or overlay effect. That is what I do for the costume like the mask. First paint the base colours(in this case, you can use dark colour or middle tone colours) then after drying, use a lighter black to colour on top of someparts of that like 50% of it. Then it would look like half of it is tinted with another shade of black.
8. Black is not Really Black! What I learned in art school was that you should mix dark blue with dark brown to create black. Because Black has shades of blue or brown. So it makes it more interesting and nice to look at when it is made by mixing instead of reaching for the tube labelled “Black.” For Batgirl, I only used the pure black for some parts and outlining.
9. Very important to dab your brush on the piece of cloth to suck off excess water, if after trimming the water on the rim of your jar doesn’t do it. Also, watch out for waterdroplets clinging onto the neck of your brush, wipe it off, or else it will drop onto your art and ruin it.
10. Key is speed: Watercolour, you need to work fast. You can't let your colours stay on a spot after putting it on with your brush, it must be spread out fast with your brush. Because always remember, your paper cannot hold too much water. The paper will become fluffy, and worse case, break and cause a hole. Key is work fast, and lightly(never too much water on your loaded brush with paint)
11. If you are right handed, paint from left to right. Don’t paint all over the place, because you might smudge the paint. Watercolour unlike acrylic can come off with water or sweat.
12. Practise steadying your hand. Watercolor needs steady concentration especially when you want to have fine lines.
13. Watercolour is light and transparent like feel. So it’s very unlike acrylic or crayons whereby you get very solid and dark colours/tones, effect. So, I try not to have too dark colours or too thick paint.
14. What to do when you make a mistake. 1st of all, try not to make mistakes. Because it’s hard to fix mistakes on watercolour, if you accidentally painted a black line across Batgirl’s face, it’s gone case. The amount of watercolour paint you paint over it won’t be able to cover it nicely. It’ll look horrible. Let’s say you accidentally stroked some unwanted colours on one part of the paper. Try to use a bit of water and wash it off with your brush. If that doesn’t work enough, wait for it to dry. Don’t keep trying to wash it more, the paper will break. Next, mix some thicker paint for that area(for example, that area is supposed to be white), mix thick white paint and cover it.
15. Last Tip: Choice of brushes. I usually go with pointy brushes of various sizes. I seldom use the flat head brushes(the squarish ones) Because pointy brushes allow me to control the contours of my lines and paint. I can paint a fine line and then I can paint a thicker line by just pressing a little harder. I prefer sable hair brushes. But nylon ones work just fine. The most important thing to me is that brushes must be of good quality. Meaning the bristles don’t fall off and come off. If not they will 1.Stick on your art. 2. It’s hard to control the lines you paint when there’s some bristles hanging out and touch your paper.
