Watercolor Bowl Painting Gradation

Video Transcript

"What we're going to do is work the system of light to dark. That way, if you make a mistake, you can cover it up with a darker color. Working dark to light doesn't work very well in watercolor, because you can't cover up dark mistakes with light paint. So, what we're going to do is start at the lightest possible color and in the darkest possible area of that shape, and color. So we're going to do a gradation, and a gradation will start with one color, like this medium gray, and work its way to complete white within this area of the bowl. So we're going to put a little bit of water on the brush, and squeegee it out. Grab some color. Put the color down just a little bit, and then stick the brush in there about an eighth of an inch, and wipe it out. And then the area that we work with is towards us. So, we're basically doing a Z shape, very tight Z shape, and sometimes, we need to go back up into the darker area in order to pull color down here. Now, we're going to wipe out the brush completely, in our bring the gradation down, and soften the edges down to the white part right here, and we're going to correct this part up here. The paint is still wet, so we can still work with it. I'm going to add a little bit more color up in the corner and if you put too much color down, you can always blot it out. That's what a second piece of paper towel is for."