In areas of the painting where you need to have a little more precision, you might need to draw a little bit darker and add a little more detail. If you draw too lightly in these areas, you may end up covering up your drawing with your first wash. If you aren’t able to see it, then you will lose track of your drawing and your painting suffer.
11 Easy Watercolor Techniques All Painters Need To Know
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Watercolor painting has long been a favorite medium of expression for enthusiasts and professional artists alike. Although you only need a brush and pigments to get started, watercolor is a material with many creative possibilities. By incorporating household supplies into your painting, you can create work that has interesting textures as well as fluid, carefree colors that showcase the best attributes of the water-based medium. Whether you are a beginner looking for watercolor inspiration or you’re just looking to refresh your artwork, these easy watercolor painting ideas are a great place to start exploring unconventional creativity.
Common Tools Needed for Popular Watercolor Techniques
You don’t have to look far for many of the supplies needed for watercolor painting techniques. In fact, you probably have some of them in your home right now. This is in addition to the essential watercolor painting supplies: a watercolor paint set, paper, and wet media brushes in various sizes.
- Table salt
- Masking tape or rubber cement. Both of these items will be used to mask the paper so that watercolor pigment cannot penetrate it. Each works in a similar way, although rubber cement is painted on the paper and has more flexibility. In contrast, masking tape is easier to apply but works better if you’re working with straight, rigid lines.
- Sewing needle
- Rubbing alcohol
- Plastic wrap
Feeling confused about why you need rubbing alcohol to paint? Don’t worry—it’s all explained below.
3 Important Watercolor Drawing Strategies
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We need to try to let go of some of our idea of perfection when it comes to drawing. Remember, you’re not creating a flawless representation of what is there in real life. You’re not creating a blueprint or some type of important document that has to be done in a very exact way.
You simply need an outline and a guideline for your painting process.
Here are three important tips for you to improve your watercolor drawings.
1. Keep Your Hand on Your Watercolor Paper When Drawing.
As you render a scene, the temptation can be to draw a little part here and then move over to another area and draw another part, haphazardly putting together your watercolor scene.
The problem with this approach is that we need to see our drawing as one whole connected piece.
Keeping your hand on the paper as you draw will help you to become more accurate. This approach will help you to better understand the relationships between different shapes of the scene. As a result, you’ll find it easier to:
- draw shapes in proportion to one another,
- draw lines with correct angles, and
- loosen up in your drawing.
2. Draw Shapes Instead of Objects When You Draw For Watercolor.
Our concept of a particular object – the image that comes to mind when you say a word like car, house, flower, or mountain – can get in the way of drawing a scene accurately.
If you pull from this preconceived image, you start to render the object the way you think it should look rather than how it actually looks. Try instead to study the shapes of the object in your reference photo or real-life scene. When you can see things as shapes instead of objects, you are better able to see what is actually in front of you, and your watercolor drawings will become more accurate.
I found this particularly helpful when I started to paint cars. I would automatically have an idea of how they should look because they are such a familiar object – something I’ve seen my whole life. So I would try to draw cars from memory, which can be really tricky. Once I started to think about them just as shapes and look at how they’re situated in the scene (relative to other objects), I was able to render them more realistically.
Rather than depicting every little thing in the scene the way you imagine it should be, pay close attention to the shapes that are actually in front of you.
ARTIST’S CORNER: WILDLIFE INSPIRES TIM BORSKI
Affectionately called the gray ghost because of the ethereal quality of its evading capture, the bonefish has held Tim Borski’s imagination for as long as he can remember.
Everything was going perfectly. Borksi just arrived in Miami; he had never fished for bonefish before, but he had an ace in hand. Legendary angler Bill Curtis was his guide.
The Borski family comes from a place far removed from the tropical wonderland — a place north and terribly cold — Wisconsin. Borski was an outdoorsman: he lived in a cabin in Stevens Point. He hunted and fished. He went to college at Wisconsin-Stevens Point and took a watercolor class that introduced him to one of his great passions in life, painting.
The winters were nothing to ignore. One day, Borski saw that there were 9 inches of fresh snow on the ground. Spending winter after winter in bitter cold just got to him. He went to the bank and took his student loan money and booked a round-trip plane ticket to Miami.
As fate would have it, Bill Curtis had a last-minute cancellation and took Borski out. Finally, at the end of the day, he caught his bonefish. Borski just picked up a six-pack of beer at a convenience store. When a nearby Dumpster caught his eye, he took his return ticket and threw it out. This is where he was going to be. This is Tim Borksi, the artist who wanted to fish.
At first Borski tried traditional jobs; he worked retail and stocked shelves. He eventually found a job where he could work a few days a week and fish the rest of them. It was through this job in an arts and crafts store that he met Frank Oblak, who taught Borski the basics of fly-tying. He would come to the Florida Keys and fish for mostly tarpon and snook.
“I just fell in love with the wide-open spaces of the Keys,” Borski said.
Borski’s flies gained popularity and is an essential part of him being an artist. As Borski says, “My flies are unique — they are kind of an abstract contemporary version of a fly.” Borski was also working on his art. With the flies selling well and giving Borski attention, the artwork started to do well, too.
With each of Borski’s works, he wants it to be interesting, he wants to push the envelope with his art. He also took a job as the caretaker for Craig Key. This would give him enough time to do his art, work on his flies and, most importantly, fish. Fishing tournaments helped Borski get more serious with his paintings. He started making bigger canvases.
Borski’s contemporary wildlife art is visually distinctive, with bold outlines and unique color combinations. The bold brushstrokes and abstract backgrounds might make you think you were looking at a piece of modern art, if it were not for the fish or bird that comfortably lives in the painting. Borski’s style is identifiable.
“It is just something that I like,” Borski said. “I’ll work on a painting and that is just the way it comes out. It is the way I see it. It is just the way I like it and that just turns out to be that style. If the finished product is cool and I like it, then I put my name on it. If I don’t like it, I won’t put my name on it.”
Borski doesn’t have a real favorite artist who inspires him; he enjoys impressionism but his interests lie more in the literary realm. He enjoys reading books while on his adventures. His biggest inspiration is fishing and the wide-open spaces of the Florida Keys and the wildlife that inhabits it. As to how Borski gets his painting ideas, he said it just comes to him. He likes painting birds besides his classic fish for which he is well known. The birds he paints are not commercial birds; you won’t catch him painting a pelican on a pier or a flamingo. Borski’s process starts with a sketch; if he likes it, he continues and starts to paint. He paints mostly in acrylics. The focus of the artwork is usually the eyes.
Borski’s life is the pursuit of fishing. His aim is to live life and not sacrifice his time to traditional work. Instead, he paved a path that had fishing come first.
“I didn’t want to become a guide, because then fishing became work,” he said. Instead, he did work that was fish- and outdoor-adjacent. Borski’s work can be found at the Angling Company in Key West. More information is at timborskiart.com, 305-393-2684 or [email protected].
