Watercolour Essay

864 Words2 Pages

Watercolour is an artistic medium used In artworks for illustrative purposes. It is used for a range of different works from landscape images to fashion illustrations. There are many different techniques used when working with watercolour, like using watercolour paints or watercolour pencils which can both be used on wet or dry paper, and both harvest many smaller techniques within them for creating different visual effects. This essay will discuss these techniques in detail and compare the practices used, and will be supported with illustrative works by Gregory Conley and Tim Fisher.

Firstly we will look at the effects that pencil and paint both have when applied to dry paper. Watercolour painting is about how much water you have on your brush with the paint, its about the speed of the water evaporating onto the pages surface for your desired look, this means you need to consider weather and humidity when you paint. Applying watercolour to dry paper is best done on a sunny day with low humidity or in a temperature controlled room because you can use a medium amount of water on your brush, whereas if you were painting on a really wet, high humidity day the paper would have more moisture in it so you could end up with an illustration that you wanted to have great control over on dry paper bleeding colour out of control as if you were applying it to wet paper. To paint on dry paper, watercolour paints and brushes are needed, the paint colours are mixed with water to give the watercolour effect to the illustration and are then painted onto the page [Image 1 by Gregory Conley]. Although you can also apply the just the paint with very little to no water on the brush known as the dry brush technique to achieve a dry water colour effect...

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...his practice differs from using a pencil where its best to shave the colour pigments onto the page and use a wet brush to dissolve these pigment scrapings to create large areas of colour [Image 9 by Tim Fisher]. These two different practices both create a very similar effect on the page, but using this practice for a watercolour pencil allows scribbles and drawing marks to be non
[9] existent after the large area of colour was drawn because of the way the colour had been applied and dissolved.
This paper has discussed many watercolour techniques and their practices which can be used to create illustrative works. We looked at using watercolour paints and pencils on both dry paper and wet paper, and also looked over how the techniques of splattering colour, and applying large amounts of colour onto the paper, were practiced using both watercolour paints and pencils.

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