Watercolor Techniques: A Crafty Tutorial

This crafty column is written by Isabella C

Watercolor techniques 

Welcome back everyone! This week we’ll be practicing watercolor techniques. There will be three techniques that we will be practicing.

           Supplies you’ll need:

• Watercolors
• Brushes
• Water
• Watercolor paper

 

Technique number one: Dark to light

For this technique, you will only need one color of your watercolors, your water and your brush.

 

1. Wet your brush with a tiny bit of water, and dip it in a lot of paint.
2. Use your brush to paint a straight line on the left part of your paper.
3. Repeat these steps, and make lines directly next on the right side to each line, making them a little overlapped. In each line you make, use a little more water and a little less paint. Continue these steps, until you are brushing your paper with almost all water, and almost no paint.

As you see, the lines overlap and make a rectangular shape. But as they do that, they form a dark-to-light visual, with the darkest on the left, with the lightest on the right. That’s why it is called dark to light!

Technique number two: Light to dark

Like the last technique, you will only need one color of your watercolors, your water, and your brush. If you would like to, you may use a different brush for this technique, or you can just use the same brush you have used last technique.

 

1. Wet your brush with a lot of water, but dip it in a little bit of paint.
2. Use your brush to paint a straight line on the left part of your paper.
3. Repeat these steps, and make lines directly next on the right side to each line, making them a little overlapped. In each line you make, use a little more paint, and a little less water. Continue these steps, until you are brushing your paper with almost all paint, and almost no water.

As you see, the lines overlap and form a rectangular shape. But as they do that, they create a light-to-dark visual, with the lightest on the left, and the darkest on the right. That’s why it’s called light to dark!

 

Technique number three: Color blend

This technique is very self explanatory; your blending colors! For this technique, you will need two colors (because you are blending two colors), and some water. You may want to use three brushes for this technique, because you might not want to mix the colors, with the different colors you are going to use (the third brush is for blending the colors, you’ll see how it’s used).

 

1. Wet your brush and dip it in some paint (for this technique, it does not matter how much water or how much paint you use).
2. Use your brush to paint two or three lines on the left side of your paper. 
3. Wet another brush and dip it in some paint, and paint two or three lines a half an inch away from the other lines you made in the last step.
4. Wet a third brush, but this time, don’t dip it in any paint. This is for blending.
5. Use the third brush to mix the colors in the space of the two colors. Try your best to mix them together, or blend them.

As you see, using the water to blend the colors make a new color in the center, but the colors seem to fade into each other. Ask yourself, “What color did it make?”, when you examine the blending point. It can vary, depending on which colors you used, or how dark or light the colors are.

Thank you for reading this week’s craft article!