Learning to Control Watercolor

     I'm trying to do understand the relationship between the amount of water on the paper, on the brush, the amount of paint and the different stages of dryness of the paper. Its easy to understand in theory, but in actual practice, there's a lot of things going on. I find it overwhelming.

Painted using 4 colors : Madder lake, Cad Red, Cad Yellow D, Cad Yellow Lemon on Arches 7' x 10' CP

     This leads me to another basic idea that I must be familiar with the behavior of the paints I'm using and how they react to paper. Is the paint transparent, staining, or granulating? How strong is the chroma? Does the color have a warm or cool bias? With these thoughts, I think I understand why we have to make color charts and why they are important.

Winsor  & Newton paints on Saunders Waterford. The black vertical bar on each swatch is a tool to determine the transparency of the pigment. The top swatch is painted with a thickest mixture possible(pan watercolor), the bottom swatch has been diluted with more water.

Different brands of paints on Arches CP 300gsm. The swatches are painted  from masstone (dense form of the paint from the tube) to a very thin wash. After all swatches have dried, I tried to lift the color completely by slightly wetting the area(see the horizontal fade). and scrubbing with a damp nylon flat brush. Notice that some pigments does not completely lift out.

    For those who are beginning to paint that doesn't have an idea of what to paint, or doesn't have have the confidence and is intimidated by a blank page or paper, try making color charts for an exercise. It will give you a head start. Did I say it's fun ?

There is a follow up post on this here