Be sure to overlap the two colors slightly where they meet. Because both colors are wet, they should bleed into each other and blend together in a pretty seamless gradation. I applied the cornflower blue on the bottom half of my sky and the cerulean on the top. ![]() This will give our background wash a bit of texture, so that it has a hazy, cloud-like appearance rather than just flat streaks. Then you want to use a larger round brush and start filling in the space using circular motions. Starting with the background, you want to choose a couple of colors (I used a cornflower blue and a cerulean blue.) and water them down so that they are consisting of mainly water with a small amount of pigment. Still, working with the background first ensures that if any background color does find its way into the waves, which it inevitably will, we can just work right over it later and you won’t even notice by the end. In this more simplified project, we will be focusing just on blending this time, not layering. ![]() It’s all about layering and building up colors since the paints themselves are translucent. With watercolor, you want to start with the background and move to the foreground, and you always want to work lightest to darkest. You can draw your design however you want, or if you want to practice this technique without the added pressure of drawing, feel free to print this outline out and use graphite paper to transfer it right onto a piece of watercolor paper (Don’t have graphite paper on hand? Just shade over the back of your printout with a pencil, lay it on top of your watercolor paper, and trace over the lines and it will work the same way, though a bit more labor intensive.). I started first with an outline, drawing my design in pencil on watercolor paper and then tracing over it with a waterproof black fine-liner pen (Sharpie fine points will work – You do not necessarily need a fancy art pen, though my preference when I do watercolor and ink work are these bad boys by Staedler.). If your brush is too big, you risk getting paint where you don’t want it but if your brush is too small, you will see all the little strokes and the paint won’t cover evenly. Your brush size depends on the size of the area you are filling in. Pretty easy to remember! It’s good to have a variety of sizes of each. ![]() Round brushes have a teardrop shaped bristle that comes to a point at the end, and flat brushes have rectangular shaped bristles that are, well, flat on the end. For this project, we will try out both flat brushes and round brushes. ![]() This is where understanding the color wheel comes in handy! For more about the color wheel, visit my earlier post Colors Aren’t Scary :). Some colors when blended together turn into “mud”, making a neutral like brown or gray. If you are a complete beginner to color mixing, it is easiest to stick to either all warm colors (red, yellow, pink, orange …) or all cool colors like I did (blue, green, violet …). Hello! Today I want to show you a fun beginner project you can do to practice blending colors with watercolor paints and markers.
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