More on Painting Wet-on-Wet

As I was completing the wet-on-wet exercises, I discovered a very important fact:

Learning: The amount of fuzziness depends not just on the amount of paint "juiciness," but the time between wetting the paper and applying paint to it.

I carried out a little experiment, using the same color and the same paint wetness, I applied the paint at 30 second intervals beginning right after I had thoroughly wet the paper with clear water until 4 minutes and 30 seconds afterwards. You can see the amount of diffusion of the paint on the paper as it began to dry.

As you can see, there is very little spreading after 2 minutes, 30 seconds. You may want to conduct a similar test because you might wet the paper with more or less water than I did and may use more or less"juicy" paint. The paper you use may also change the rate of drying. 

Just remember that the amount of time between wetting the paper and applying paint will yield different "loose edges." The more you know about how slow or fast to paint on wet paper to achieve desired results, the more control you will have!

Painting Wet-on-Wet

After learning about painting on dry paper (which I need much more practice doing in order to achieve a smooth effect), the next exercise involved painting with wet paint on wet paper. This method is called painting "wet-on-wet." In addition to painting on a clear wet surface, the method also applies to adding paint to any already wet painted surface.

The exercise involved painting a snowy wood with all wet surfaces. This is the image of the painting from the book. Note that all the edges are very soft.

The goal here was to paint the entire scene on wet paper. A point made was that it is sometimes useful to soak the paper for hours or even overnight and then to let the surface moisture evaporate before applying paint. I am guessing that this is the method the authors used as even if the paper was thoroughly wetted, it would dry too much to complete the entire painting wet-on-wet. Since I didn't soak the paper, I ended up doing a combination of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry or nearly dry. This is how my painting turned out.

While most of the edges are fairly soft, as are most of the shadows, I ended up using some wet on dry as the paper began to dry too quickly. I would have either needed to keep wetting the paper with clear water (a hassle), or soaking it, in order to have the whole thing reflect a true wet-on-wet appearance. I'm also not sure I would have liked the result more than a mixture of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry--especially for a painting with a limited color palette like this one. There wouldn't have been enough variety. I think the combination of hard and soft edges makes it a bit more interesting. This painting certainly isn't especially noteworthy, but it is pleasing in its simplicity.

Learning: If you want to do a painting entirely in a wet-on-wet style, it's best to soak the paper instead of just applying a good wetting to it. A combination of soft and hard edges may make a painting more interesting than either all one or the other.

Wet on Dry Painting

Since I already had most of the colors the author recommended, I created several new palettes (using those cheap, round 10-well palettes) with the prescribed colors so that I had a better chance of approximating the results that the author achieved. You may or may not decide to do the same.

Before getting into the first section on trees, the book (pp, 22 - 27) discusses two of the major ways of putting paint onto paper: the wet on dry and the wet-on-wet methods. I have typically had a very tough time getting large smooth areas of color when using the wet on dry method, whereby I used wet paint on my brush on dry watercolor paper. This was so troublesome for me that I tend to avoid this method for larger areas like skies. However, I followed the instructions on p. 22 and didn't do too badly. However, I also found that I'd made rather a mess of the rest of the painting (for which there were no directions), so did another version, since it was a simple composition.

Here is the painting used as an illustration for this wet on dry technique.

When I looked at this painting, I figured that the artist had used the blue in the sky down to the ground, using additional washes, putting more green into the blue. This is how I painted my first version.

While the sky isn't too bad, I think I tried to add the next wash for the mountain and the trees, before the previous one had dried. And the splotchiness is what happened. Nor was I able to fix it which is my main reason for doing another version.

LEARNING: Either wait until the paper is completely dry before adding another wash on top of it OR be sure the initial paint is still wet enough to allow additional color to be dropped into it. 

In this case, given the shape of the mountains and the trees, I think I should have waited until the initial blue wash had completely dried. Here is my second attempt. In this one I only took the blue of the sky down to the mountain and then stopped, let it dry, then added the trees after the mountain had dried. Although this is not what I suspect the author wanted, I felt more confidant painting this way.

Although not as smooth as the book's version, both the mountain and the trees are better than in the first version, as are the rest of the elements in this painting, and am much happier with it. I have to say that the color scheme here is quite interesting. I don't think I would have thought of it on my own.

I felt confidant that I knew how to create a varigated wash so skipped the exercise on pp. 24 & 25.