Explore watercolour

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

■ Refine your watercolour technique

■ The importance of timing

■ Seeing connections in your subject

In this third article on how to advance your watercolour technique, I’m looking at edges and timing. In watercolour, the term lost edge is used to describe a gradual transition of paint between one mark and another when they are laid side by side before either has dried. A found edge on the other hand results from laying wet paint against or on top of dry. Between the two extremes, however, is a whole series of edges, which we do well to understand. There is also a relationship between the richness of a watercolour mixture and the dampness of the surface on which we lay it, affecting the behaviour of paint when we make a mark, but we can sometimes forget that when wrestling with other issues.

Let’s look in (International Artist Publishing, 2002) Joseph Zbukvic explains it by referring to a ‘watercolour clock’. One side of the clock describes a range of mixture strengths, weak to strong, which Zbukvic likens to tea, coffee, milk, cream and butter consistencies. The other side of the clock has four categories of moisture content of the background paper: dry, damp, moist and wet. The book shows sequential images in the progress of several paintings, describing passages of paint as ‘coffee on damp’, ‘cream on wet’ and so on. It’s an excellent analogy that will enable you to visualise the behaviour of brush, paint and paper in your head. It is important because understanding timing is probably the most significant skill separating watercolour from other media.