Common Flaws

Hi gang, sorry i have been away, went fishing in Ontario Canada and had a great time.
This section is on common flaws when beginning your watercolors. Flaws is a weak term but my students view them as that so we will use the term. When beginning watercolor painting, there are characteristics that show up in your washes etc. that are normal and natural and will go away with time. Here are a few:

BANDING. when doing washes for practice and you are using a back and forth brush stroke, moving down the page as you paint, you may get banding marks in the wash. this is usually due to a number of things:
1. you are putting too much pressure on the brush, driving the brush into the paper where the brush has more than one point of contact with the paper, leaving two marks or streaks not one
2. your brush angle may be too low, again putting more than one part of brush on paper and leaving a banding affect.
3. i suggest really lightening up on your pressure, move your hand away from the ferrule up the handle, and put the pressure of your hand into your pinky with the pinky resting on the paper and moving with the stroke, it really helps.

BLOSSOMS AT BOTTOM OF WASH. when you get to the end of a wash, and the paper is dry, the bead left at the bottom will usually not keep running down the paper but will sit there. here is where the example of drying wash sucking up the wetter wash comes into play. as the wash above starts to dry out, it pulls the wetter bead back up into itself (the damp dry sponge affect on your wetter brush) and you will get a blossom. HINT: wipe your brush and use it as a blotter and run it over the bead to pick up the excess water into your brush from the paper.

FLOODING. i prefer students to be more wet than dry so i dont worry about flooding where you have water from previous strokes running down the paper into the new wash area. sometimes this can be the cheaper studennt grade paper or just too much water in the brush. just keep practicing and dont get too dry.

BREAKING EDGES. get in the habit of breaking or lifting out your edges as you finish a wash. quickly either add water no pigment to the end of the wash as if doing a merging and let the wash edge just soften out like cotton; or quickly go into the wet edge with a damp brush and lift our or break the wet edge to soften it and avoid hard edges.

More later, have fun. Ron K