Tips and Techniques for Painting in Watercolor
Practical tips for learning how to understand and manage tonal value in watercolor painting
I very often hear admonitions about the importance of value in painting. What I hear less frequently, except for advice that preliminary value sketches are helpful, is practical advice on how to go about choosing values. Although I don’t have a specific formula for deciding on values, I have accumulated several rules of thumb that are helpful to me.
Some days the paintings work, and some days they don’t. Yesterday’s was a real stinker, and I’m trying to figure out why. (Maybe I’ll post a picture of it later.) The scene was a group of backlit trees and a tombstone painted late in the afternoon. The foreground was in complete shadow.
I did another watercolor outside this morning. Although I wasn’t entirely happy with the results, I did manage to take pictures after each wash. Here’s what I did:
Value does all the work; color takes all the credit.
I saw this quote on a bulletin board a while back, and it has become one of my favorites. There are so many times people have looked at my work and said: “Oh, the colors are so great.” The truth is that I pay very little attention to color, but I pay a lot of attention to value. If the value structure is strong, you can do pretty much whatever you want with color.
