Working with watercolours

Working with watercolours.
A collection of hopefully useful hints and links:

It seems preposterous to make a tutorial about working with watercolours and telling people what to do and not to do. I suppose that each artist is very unique in his/her approach to the matter. Some will work in thin, transparent layers, others will prefer the strong colours that come out of tubes. Some will never condescend to use black and others will use it all the time. There are purists who never would dare touch any white or use other media to reinforce their pics and give them more depth.

Well, my personal opinion is: try out what you like, study the works of classics like Constable, Dufy, Nolde, Schiele and many, many others and then do your own thing. ☺

A few little hints that may help you in the beginning:

Use the VERY BEST brush you can get. Sable brushes are wonderful to work with, you can achieve very thin lines and broad strokes just with one thick brush.
Vegans don't like to use animal products, but there are of course very good synthetic brushes on the market.

Use a very small collection of colours in the beginning. Experiment with them, try to mix whatever colour you need with those 6 basic colours. (The names can vary with the brands, but only the hues are important.)

Lemon Yellow (Light yellow tint)
Gambodge or Cadmium Yellow (Golden yellow tint)
Vermilion or Cadmium Red (Orangey red tint)
Alizarin Madder or Permanent Rose (Bluish red tint)
Ultramarine Blue (Warm blue tint)
Winsor Blue (green tint) or Prussian Blue (Cool blue tint)

It's sometimes useful to add some green and brown to get quicker results, especially for darker areas or landscapes; maybe some colour like

Sap Green
and
Burnt Umber

I've come to like Raw Umber very much. It's a great colour to use as a base colour for flesh tones, you can add red to get the right hue. Burnt Sienna can also be used as base for flesh colour, it gives a rather ruddy skin tone.

If you want to specialize and mainly paint flowers or animals you will probably adapt your palette to suit your needs and get a wider range of reds or browns.

It's better to begin with a restricted palette and to get to know the mixing properties of each of your primary colours before expanding your experiments to new hues.

This book by Jan Hart is fantastic to guide you through the jungle of pigments: "The Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Colour"
janhart.com/product/jan-s-wate…
Ms Hart's website:
www.janhart.com/

Here's a website where you can find every possible info about pigments, their properties, they way they work and almost all watercolour brands get described and rated. Sometimes I think the author is a bit biased and only favours brands coming from the US and UK, but that might be a question of taste. handprint.com/HP/WCL/pigmt2.ht…

Watercolour technique is taught exceptionally well by Glynis Barnes-Mellish and her portraits are just awe inspiring. I'm completely in love with the way she uses watercolours.
Site:
www.barnesmellish.com/
Her tutorial books are worth every penny (and much more!):
www.amazon.com/Practical-Art-W…

And then another artist that I've recently discovered, Jeanne Dobie: I very much like her approach to mixing colours.
Site:
www.jeannedobie.com/

It's nice to begin with the best quality, of course, and those 6 or 8 colours, even in their best quality will be much cheaper than a whole set of, let's say, Copics.

WHERE TO FIND THOSE WATERCOLOURS:

(Do yourself a favour and NEVER EVER buy half-pans. They're horrible to work with, you have to poke holes into the colours and they ruin the tips of your brush. Always favour WHOLE pans or even tubes. I personally mostly use pans because they come in a box that can be used as a mixing palette.)

I find this online supplier to be very interesting because they offer a wide range of different brands:
www.greatart.co.uk