Painting 101  

Additional techniques in paintings

by Tissa Hewavitarane

There are many techniques especially in water colour painting. One should learn and bring them out at the appropriate time. The real purists will have them and call them 'gimmicks'. I suppose you would say are rather like swear words - known about but kept in reserve until you hit your thumb with a hammer. If you're continually using them they just become boring. Take masking solutions. I suppose I use it in about one in twenty of my paintings, when it really does fulfil a useful purpose. Here then are few ideas, but watch it, they're no substitute for talent.

Washing out

The legend is that water colour once put on paper is there for good and can't be altered, which is why so many would-be water colour painters don't try it. The truth is of course very different. Whole areas are sometimes the whole painting can be washed off and repainted without anyone being any wiser. You will often get troubles with fore grounds. The top half of the painting may be fine but something awful comes over people when they put in fore grounds. They are unsure of themselves, and it shows. It so often turns out be tired, over worked muddy mess. First let the whole painting dry. This is very important. Then put the paper in the sink and then turn the tap on gently until the whole thing is immersed and the water is flowing over it. Surprisingly, nothing happens to the colour until it is touched and then it flows away. Use a soft hake brush gently to take away the ruined portions. It often happens that distant hills or trees are painted in too dark, bringing them too far forward. A gentle touch of the hake and they gradually fade until they are about right. Of course, if the whole painting has been over worked and is muddy you can remove it, just leaving a faint image of the original.

Lift the paper out of the water and put it on a drawing board to dry. When it is dry you can paint over it, but if you want a wet-into-wet treatment you can recommence the painting before it dries. Some colours leave a strain on the paper that no amount of washing can remove. Don't wait until you have crucial problems though, get out one of your failures and experiment with it. Various water colour papers respond differently to the treatment.

White paint

I never use the stuff myself because it's opaque. I always try to keep water colours transparent. In water colour you may have to decide where your whites are to be before you start your picture.

Either paint round them or mask them out. I always keep the white paper open without introducing colour. You usually start by painting the light tones first and work through the middle tones to the dark. With the skies the chief fault is nearly always timidity. Don't play about with skies, pushing the paint around too much, sometimes painting a blue sky all over and then jabbing out their clouds with different colours will always spoil your picture. My own feeling is the less you touch and torture the surface the fresher and more professional the painting looks.

Sponges

I always keep a small natural sponge while painting for all sorts of purposes. If can be used to lift almost any colour clean while the paint is still moist, such as wiping out light clouds in a darker sky. Its main use is to produce texture by dabbling it, loaded with paint gently on to paper. Keep on experimenting you'll find endless possibilities. Try it with various consistencies of paint and even with synthetic sponges, which come in course and fine textures.

Learn all you can about sponges and then put them away until a legitimate use presents itself like texturing a large rock where it can be use for putting in foliage.

Masking fluid

One of the problems that water colour has compared with oil painting is the white areas. With oil painting you just use white paint but with water colour you normally leave the paper blank and paint round the space. This is fairly straight forward with large simple areas, but with complex shapes, like white boats and houses against dark backgrounds, it's sometimes almost impossible or at best inhibiting. The answer, of course, is to cover the area with masking fluid. Masking fluid is a pale yellow liquid you buy in bottles. It is a colloidal suspension of rubber solution in water. You have to before you commence the picture where your white areas are to be and then paint them with the solution. The yellow colour is to show where you've applied it. You can then paint over it with confidence and once dry it can be removed by gently rubbing with the top of your finger and the virgin white paper appears where it's needed.

Stencils

Using a stencil is a very useful technique for lifting out such things as sails, seagulls and light figures. Say you want to put a white seagull in front of a rock or sky.

After painting the background normally, draw your seagull on a separate tracing paper overlay, cut out the shape with a stanly knife and lay the stencil carefully in position scrubbing through the whole with a bristle brush or sponge, and lifting off the moist colour with a tissue. Do it gently and patiently, so as not to damage the paper and don't use too much water or it will creep under the edge of the stencil.

www.tissahewavitarane.com