It has been a while since I last publicly posted here to my watercolor journal. I’ve been distracted, but I am less so now and hope to be more regular with future posts. One of the reasons which prompted me to create this journal originally was to provide myself with some structure and discipline in my pursuit of developing my skills with watercolor painting.

Interestingly enough, the name chosen for this journal is Water + Pigment + Practice. Perhaps the most important part of that title is the part about Practice. Early on, most of what I have written in my journal has been mostly technical and pertaining to the relationship of the Water and the Pigment. But ultimately the direction forward to mastering this form of painting is all along the Practice paths. Interestingly enough, I have separated my Practice into three parts that can be worked on almost independent of each other, yet should be developed concurrently. No one practice area is sufficient by itself as they all contribute to creating successful paintings. The first distinct area for focused practice is Mastery of Brushes. The second distinct area for practice is Mastery of Techniques and Execution. The third distinct area for practice is the Mastery of Design and Composition.

Mastery of Brushes : Perhaps the most significant tools used in watercolor painting are your brushes. A painter’s kit can and usually does include many different sizes and types of brushes. A paint brush consists of essentially three parts; the handle, the ferrule, and the bristles. For clarity, the term bristle is often used to denote a singular fibre or hair and also to denote a grouping of fibres and/or hairs. Collectively then it is the business end of the brush. Brushes are often grouped by bristle shapes into flats and rounds. And those flats and rounds can vary based on physical size, thickness of bristles or bristle density, bristle materials and bristle mixtures and the brushes purpose or specialty . ( future posts will get into more depth about brushes from a technical perspective ) Fundamentally, each brush size and type of brush has unique characteristics that will influence how it may be used. Watercolor painting is a transparent media. Simplistically, light passes thru layers of paint down to the paper’s surface and reflects back revealing the layers visually. To the viewer, the layers are optically mixed or blended. This optical mixing applies to colors but it also reveals your brush strokes. Therefore, brush strokes can be an integral part of the painting every bit as much as colors and values. Mastery of your brushes and all of their potential ways of making marks, strokes, significantly contributes to your expressiveness in your paintings.

Mastery of Techniques and Execution : Techniques refer to things such as application of paint to paper – wet on dry, wet on wet, dry on wet, dry on dry, types of washes, layering, drizzling, optical mixing, scraping, splattering, pouring as well as the selection of values and colors. Execution encompasses the steps and methods you use in physically creating your paintings.

Mastery of Design and Composition: Design and Composition are the mental aspects of painting. Layout, choice of subject, degrees of realism or abstraction, everything that goes into the creative process that normally aren’t the physical aspects. Great technique and execution will produce paintings, but without great design and composition those painting will be dull and uninteresting.

Going forward I hope to be expanding on these areas to be practiced and developed. The main point of this post is to illuminate that a structured approach is useful in learning to become a successful watercolor painter. You can just grab some paper, a brush, water and pigment and try to paint a picture. But in order to become a painter you need a skills development approach. As with all endeavors that are skills based, it takes practice, lots of practice. What you practice and how you practice and how often you practice makes a big difference in achieving your desired objectives.