Beginner Techniques

Matting and Framing Your Work Matting your watercolors protects and enhances the look of your paintings by cleanly defining the image edges and isolating your image in a uniform neutral or complementary background. Mats are made from mat board which should be made from all cotton acid free fiber. How to make a mat 101 As a start, choose neutral off white mats either warm or cool depending of the overall hue and value of your painting. After you've been at it a while and have seen what others are doing with colors and bevels and layers feel free to...

Andrew Wyeth's reputation has centered around watercolors and egg tempera paintings such as "Christina's World". Painted in 1948 and later purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, this is one of the most recognized paintings in American art. Egg Tempera Techniques - by Michael Bergt Egg tempera is a fast drying medium that is fluid by nature and must be applied thinly in semi-opaque and transparent layers. The binding qualities of the egg does not allow for impasto painting. Because of tempera's fluid, fast drying property, it is best suited for a more linear style rather than the thick, brushy...

Basics of Drawing: Materials To draw, all you really need is a pencil or pen and a scrap of paper. If you have that, skip this section and start drawing. However, if you don't know a darned thing about drawing materials, what they look like or what they do, or if you need encouragement, understanding, wit, or just like to look at art stuff, read everything on this website. It's free. The choices available in drawing materials are wide and varied. The links at the top of this page offer examples of the conventional drawing media that artists choose to...

Techniques for Drawing Values Drawing Lines and Values Drawing involves the use of lines and clusters of lines called "values". Lines and values often merge spontaneously as you draw, one springing from another in the same stroke. The better you understand the range of expression and working qualities of your pencil or pen, the broader your palette of artistic options are when you create. A line is a flowing stroke of your pencil that defines an edge in the image you are drawing. Value is the gradation of grays you use to define the mass, form, light, and design of...

Design Principles and Elements: an aesthetic tapestry Look around you. Everything you see that is made by man is made by design. Our buildings, our transportation, our entertainment, the items we consume; everything is designed for a purpose. Some design is utilitarian, some is ergonomic, some informative, and a whole lot of design is aesthetic. Products are designed to please the eye and produce a reaction based on the "feel" the product evokes from the viewer/user. Artists do this every time a pencil is sharpened or a color is mixed. We are the designers. When you look through the catalog...

Popular Compositional Themes As a pastime, watercolor legend Edgar Whitney inventoried and cataloged successful painting compositions. He weighed the primary visual masses by size and value as well as arrangement and came up with six visual themes that most successful paintings appear to fall into. As an aid for composing paintings, these themes were passed on to his students, including Tony Couch, who wrote about them in his book: Watecolor: You Can Do It!. What we have here are the symbols of first impressions of paintings. The vague shapes and values that first attract your eyes to interesting paintings have...

Bands of Color This exercise is designed to hone your wash-laying skills in the form of single strokes of color laid down side by side in whatever pattern your first stroke takes. The object is to concentrate on the white line you are forming between each stroke. Try not to touch any previous strokes, keeping the white lines of unpainted paper unbroken. Mix several puddles of different colors on your watercolor palette. I used a round #10 red sable for most of this exercise. A round #4 red sable was used to add smaller variations in the gaps. A larger...

The Classic The Classic grip for holding a watercolor brush is much like the way you hold a pen or pencil for writing. The only difference being that you (for the most part) are gripping the brush further from the business end of things. Pick up your brush and grip the thickest part of the handle above the ferrulle—the body of the brush—and hold it like you are getting ready to write a letter. Remember writing? Weigh the brush in your hand, roll it with your fingers, find the balance of the brush in your grip. Since you are holding...