How to Sketch With Watercolors
Watercolors are often considered a challenging medium, as they are runny and rather unforgiving. However, watercolors mix quickly and easily, dry fast and need only a few materials to get started. This makes them ideal for sketching, particularly outdoors. In addition, watercolors are nontoxic and require only water for mixing and cleaning the brushes, which means that waste color and water are very easy to dispose of, which is not true of mediums like oils or acrylics. A watercolor set designed for sketching or cake-type watercolors that come in a pan with a lid are best for this.
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Things You'll Need
- Pen
- Watercolor set
- Watercolor sketchbook
- Watercolor brushes
- Small container
- Water
- Paper towels
Instructions
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Set up your workspace, so that you are comfortable and can work quickly. Pour some water into your container, set out all of your brushes within easy reach, and open up your watercolor set. The lid can be used to mix colors if needed; sketch sets often come with a palette for mixing.
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Sketch your general composition in your sketchbook with the pen. Be loose and not too detailed. If you are not comfortable using a pen, a pencil works well, too.
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Look carefully at your subject, then think about the picture in sections. For instance, if you were painting a lake with a hill, you could roughly divide the image into three sections, the hill, sky and trees. Dip a wide brush into plain water and lightly wet the area on your sketch that you want to work on first. Choose the most distant area first, typically the sky.
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Paint the wet area. Dip a brush into your water, then add some water to the color that you want to use with the brush, touching the watercolor cake to mix. Work in thin, quick washes, adding other colors into the wash to try to match what you see. You can't remove color from the paper, so shade a little at a time, gradually becoming darker. You can touch your brush to the palette or a paper towel to check the color before you use it on the paper.
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Wet the next section and keep working, adding color in thin washes, until you have colored your entire sketch. Clean your brush in water when changing colors.
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Add detail using small brushes and thicker washes of color. Wait for the paper to dry most of the way, before adding detail to the sketch, as wet paper makes the color run. If you want to work fast, use just a little water with a small brush to make bold, fast and sketchy strokes. You can also use the pen to refine your initial sketch -- or use crosshatching to quickly indicate dark, shadowy areas.
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Tips & Warnings
Try other supplies to find what suits your style. You can also try watercolor pencils, which are easier to control, or water brushes, which are brushes that contain a small reservoir of water, enabling you to paint without carrying a water supply.
Be sure to use sketchbooks designed for watercolor or sketchbooks with thick paper only. Thin paper designed for pencil will fall apart.
Experiment; try many different techniques until you find the one that suits your style and the speed that you need to work at.
References
- Photo Credit Steve Mason/Photodisc/Getty Images
