What children need to know in watercolour painting

Learn to draw by Tissa Hewavitharana

Today watercolour painting has become a popular medium in art. It is highly expressive, exciting and enjoyable and a versatile medium. Watercolour painting is also one of the most challenging and economical of all painting media. Children or any beginner needs to know to get started in water colour painting, it is the wash technique that is introduced to beginners.

Wash

The principle of watercolour painting is simple: All one needs to do is wet the brush with colour and water and spread it over the paper. First of all I recommend you to practise the basics of the wash technique with a single colour, before painting with many colours. Therefore, for the present, we will concentrate on using one colour.

A small amount of paint is placed on the water colour palette. Once the colour is on the palette, water is added with the brush. The more water you add, the more transparent the tone appears. The palette could be a saucer, a porcelain container or lid of the paint box will do.

Once the colour is on the palette, a little paint is placed in a compartment.

Then a little water is added with the brush to lighten the colour. First apply the colour with a wet brush. Next the brush is washed in water and rinsed and the colour is spread. A tone is made more transparent by adding water to it.

You will observe this landscape was painted with only one colour. Different tones were obtained by adding more or less water to the original colour to lighten it, as well as applying pure colour in the darkest areas of the painting. The brushes used were No. 1 and 2. No. 6 was used for dark tones. The paper used was Kent paper 250 grams.