Experimenting With Watercolor

In preparation for World Watercolor Month that starts tomorrow, July 1st, I decided to experiment with my paints!  You can find out more about it here:  https://doodlewash.com/world-watercolor-month-july-2016/

World Watercolor Month was created by Charlie O’Shields at Doodlewash.com!  YAY Charlie!

Sometimes it is just plain fun to mix colors in transparent and opaque paints and make patterns using different sized brushes.

I was inspired by this book to give this project a try:

These were the different sized brushes I used:

I selected 3 different papers.  The first one was new to me.  I recently purchased “Khadi” paper from Amazon for another project.  I wanted to see how the paper would absorb the watercolor.  I also used Fabriano hot and cold-press paper.  All the paper was 140 lb.

I also decided to experiment with both transparent watercolor (I primarily use Winsor and Newton) and opaque (gouache) watercolor.  I have some student grade gouache paints from Reeves that are OK but I wanted to try my recent splurge of professionally grade ones from Holbein.

Here are my experiments:

Khadi cold-press paper:

This paper was fun to use but took a lot of water.  Therefore, the intensity of my transparent paints on the left look pretty similar to the opaque ones on the right.

Fabriano cold-press paper:

As you can see above, my opaque colors are much more intense on the right side of this paper.  I also noticed a big difference in quality using the Holbein Gouache.

Fabriano hot-press paper:

The Fabriano hot-press paper had similar results in intensity as the cold-press paper to me.

It was very meditative to do this experiment.  I am sure I will refer back to it in the future for different color combinations.

I hope you will be splattering the watercolor paints along with me in July!

Happy Painting!  🙂