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An Overview of Watercolor Paint
Watercolor is an incredible way to express yourself through painting. Watercolors are very, very fluid. They’re easy to use, and they absolutely make you let go because you don’t always have control over the watercolors. I personally love to use them in a way that is very expressive.
So, sometimes I even create very fast paintings with watercolors to express a feeling, to express an idea. And, you can also become quite, quite detailed with watercolors as well. What some people don’t like about watercolor is that it’s not always so easy to make changes.
I can just use a paper towel and wipe some of the paint away. At some point, with watercolors, you do lose the opportunity to paint over again and again. One wonderful thing with watercolor is there are a variety of ways to apply the paint, sometimes very loose, and sometimes very, very specific.
You can apply watercolor paint into a wet area already, and you can watch how the colors will just automatically do their own thing. You can also use watercolor paint that comes in trays, or watercolor paint also comes in tubes. And you can actually - and most people don’t know this - but you can actually use the tubed watercolor and apply it somewhat thick and even get some nice texture. You can also combine drawing with watercolor, and one thing I love to do is to look at watercolors as almost like a visual journal.
Thomas Merton says that art allows ourselves to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. So, if that’s an experience that you are wanting, watercolor will be perfect for you. Thank you for watching.
Rebecca Schweiger
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ARTISTS AND SUMMER OUTDOOR PAINTING
By Valerie Kent
Artists who love to paint in plein air, or outdoors, find that summer is an
odd time to paint outside. I know that is surprising because the weather
is good and it is much easier to travel to interesting locations, but there is a
reason some do not care for that season. It is that a lot of the landscape is
green and it is very uninteresting to paint everything the same.
That is why the fall is so popular for outdoor painting for Canadian artists.
However, the more experienced artists do not paint everything the same
green when painting summer scenes. What they do is add other colours
in various shades to the greens or mix their own greens by adding red
and yellow and blue or earth colours and greens, and even black and white
and they might use yellow, yellow green, blue green, and a myriad of other colour combinations for more realistic summer nature mixes.
The Group of Seven artists used a wide range of colours in their art works
to make a statement and none of their paintings are monotonous because
they hesitated about using more colour in their art work. They took
lots of liberties and probably added many colours that were not there.
Contemporary painters enjoy the challenge of colour. They do not hesitate
to paint soft yellow skies, purple roads, and other elements in
landscape with emotive colours and in creative ways. They do not
remain slaves to what they see. They often can do abstracted landscapes
picking and chosing the elements these artists wish to include.
They are of the mind that the painting, once started, is a world onto itself.
It does not have to adhere completely to what is being viewed. They can
move landscape elements around, to whisk a tree which is on the right
in real life to the left side of the painting, to include in or remove
that which does not contribute to the compositional flow, the colour moods
and the emotions that the artists are trying to elicit.
Adding that to the directionality of the artwork, vertical for the active
landscape and horizontal for calmer could be other ways in which the
artist changes up the ways to view the summer world.
For myself I love to paint outdoors in the summer time. I can place myself
under a tree, listen to the brook gurgling over the rocks, hear the summer
sounds. My vocation and avocation are the same. I paint to live and I live
to paint. www.valeriekent.com