If you have been following my earlier posts, then you know that I intuitively knew that there was a gap in my understanding of watercolor painting. It wasn’t some magical secret but it also was not as obvious as many artists, who write books or make YouTube videos on watercolor, think. The title of this post may seem strange in a blog about watercolor painting, but I bring it up to make a point. Many years ago I started to learn to play tennis. My friend and I were both beginners and we would go out on the tennis court every week and try to hit a tennis ball back and forth over the net. The ball went everywhere except where we wanted it to go. We had virtually no control of the ball. We could get a tiny amount of control by very gently tapping the ball, but that’s pretty worthless. As I look back, the tennis ball seemed to have a mind of it’s own. Does that sound familiar? There had to be a way to control the ball, to make it fly over the net and drop down into the court inside the lines. Lots of people knew how, but what was the “obvious” missing connection between the tennis racket and the tennis ball. Then one day, I read an article that explained the “how and why” of controlling  a tennis ball. It is all based on the direction of the spinning of the ball and the rotational speed at which it spins. The strings on the racket when brushed over the ball impart spin and the acceleration of the racket head moving those strings across the surface of the ball at contact controls the speed of ball rotation. It’s all aerodynamics. The point is that you can “hit” a tennis ball all day and never have any real control. But you can “brush” your strings across the surface of a ball imparting spin and rotational speed and land it on a dime on the other side of the net. It takes practice to really master this control, but if you understand what has to happen, then you know what to practice.

So an interesting clue toward gaining control of watercolors might lie in the domain of fluid dynamics, most specifically capillary action. After all, water, a key component in the “water – pigment – paper” relationship, is a liquid, a fluid. And that leads to sponges. Tennis rackets have strings to help create control and watercolor painting control is all about sponges. Next post is going to be really enlightening….