Part 10: What Angle Should I Paint Out? | Do Not Be Afraid of Watercolor Series
Welcome to the Do Not Be Afraid of Watercolor Series. In this video, we learn about the angles we can paint at.
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Colors:
Burnt Sienna
Ultramarine blue
Bright violet
Materials:
Bulldog Clips
Tape Staples
Good morning, and welcome. My name is Paul Valdez, and I have been a watercolor artist for 30 years and I certainly do thank you for joining me on the Do Not Be Afraid of Watercolor series. My job is to make watercolor easier for you, better for you and help you become a more bold artist. Hopefully you'll avoid the mistakes. I've made and become a professional watercolor beginner.
Today, we're going to talk angles. Should my board be flat? Should my board be at a 90 degree angle like this? I've seen some people paint like that, 45 degree angle, 25%.
Well, that all depends. Are you using Bulldog Clips? Which is what I use here. Tape Staples to hold your water color to the board? That is a personal preference and really has nothing to do with angles except that your paper should be attached to a board. So you can use different angles. Yep, you heard that right, different angles. I work mostly at a twenty to thirty percent angle but flat as well. A lot like this and sometimes 90 degrees.
Depending, I turn my board sideways upside down left, right. I like to jog it back and forth. I stand and paint so that I could move back away from my painting. If I paint wet on dry. I can be at almost any angle. If I paint wet-on-wet? I use less of an angle unless I really want the paint to run. Let me demo that for you real quick. Let's do a little wet on wet over here. So I'm going to wet my paper.
Really well, you can see probably quite plainly that I need to clean my brushes. Oh, I'm going to put in a little ultramarine blue over here. And I'm going to let this kind of run. And you'll see with the angle that I have right now. It's, it's not really running a lot. But as I lift it and move it down towards a 90 degree angle. You can see the movement that the paint has. Putting it back down. I'm going to get some clean paint and I'm going to try a little bit of burnt sienna.
Okay, and I'm going to just throw it right here. Now, let's just say that I want those two colors to blend but I don't want to blend them on the pallet and I don't want to blend them on the paper. I want them to do their own blending. So now I'm going to turn my paper upside down and allow. The two colors to do their own mixing and turn it sideways. A little bit. Turn it back down. Let it go, the other way. And I do that a lot so that the colors do their own mixing as you can see here.
I use Bulldog Clips a lot. That way, if I need to move my paper or do anything, it's simple. If it buckles because I'm doing I can wait till it dries and then smooth it out, you know taping it. I don't like when I if I paint wet-on-wet I don't like my paper taped.
But let me just show you this beautiful mix that's going on here.
And that is solely done. By putting the two colors close to each other and allow gravity to mix the two colors. I really like, what's going on in this little general vicinity here, creating kind of a neutral gray, and I'm going to just take a another color, just for fun and just put it down in here and I'm going to put it right across here. And now, I'm going to let gravity do a little couple of things and I'm going to move my paper and you can see the water, as it's moving up the page and it's going to take this color. Which is a violet too bright Violet by Holbein and now it's taken it up towards the burnt sienna and towards the ultramarine blue.
I probably couldn't make that color, allowing gravity to let the granules do its own mixing. I think that's just gorgeous. This is basically the angle that I do my painting at sometimes a little bit less. Now, If I'm painting wet on dry you don't really have that run of the gravitational pull so much as you do when everything is wet.
Pretty much everything stays and depending on how much pigment you use, everything stays pretty much where you want it to and you end up creating what is called the water color bead. You'll notice right here as you pull the paint down. You create a little bead and everything's going to stay right there, right there, until you push it down just a little further. And then you got that bead and you are golden. As long as you have that bead, that bead right there.
So we're going to push it even further down and I'm not going to have a hard edge. As long as I have that bead there. I can bring in some other color. And I'm good because I still have that bead there. So I'm going to take that down. And as you can see, it creates a nice little bead and it stays right where I put it. What I do is I dry off my brush and I will come back and soak that up with a thirsty brush. Here we go. So, all this comes down to trial and error, practice, practice, practice watercolor paper is expensive. So as I do, utilize both sides.
Make sure as I've been saying for quite a while that you use good watercolor paper. It just will not work. If you use cheap paper, you will not like the results. And I promise you, you'll get frustrated and quit. There are outstanding watercolor artist that can paint all in one go and get it done. And I really admire that, but mostly we paint in layers. First layer, wet soft light, good shapes. Second layer, more value, leaving lights, views of medium greys. And then the third layer, your darkest, dark and harder edges. It's the dance one that you choreograph and execute.
Well, I hope this has helped you a little bit on becoming a better watercolor artist. This is Paul Valdez. Thank you for joining me and we'll see you next time.
