​I've got lots of new students, beginners and not-so beginners, so this is a good time to talk about how to care for your watercolour brushes.

Why?

because they're expensive - my first natural bristle brush cost $300 - I'd better look after it!!

that was close to 25 years ago and it's still a great brush - because I look after it!!

1. Rinse sizing out of new brushes. Some new brushes come with gum-arabic sizing holding the bristles together. The bristles will feel hard and crusty and may be stuck together completely. To remove the glue before first use, simply swill the brush around in clean warm water and use your fingers to gently massage the sizing out of the bristles.
2. Prepare your brushes before you start painting by wetting them and letting them absorb a little water before you start painting. Blot off the excess water and leave them lying flat on a towel (or tip down if you have a brush holder). You want them ready to go when you need them so they'll absorb paint and water when you want to load your brush - it's impossible to paint with a dry brush!!
3. Always squeeze out fresh paint before you start painting, this doesn't seem like brush care I know, however, brush bristles will wear and break if continually used to scrub at dry (aka bird poo) paint.
4. Don’t leave watercolour brushes standing/soaking in water. 
5. When you are finished painting for the day, rinse thoroughly with clear water, blot them gently with a clean towel and leave them to dry flat on a towel. 
6. Don't store your brushes in an airtight container, even if you think they are dry inside the ferrule, they might not be. Remove your damp brushes from rolls or open up brush carriers as soon as you get home. If you transport your brushes to a class or a plein air session in a brush carrier, be sure to unroll or open it as soon as you get home to allow moisture to evaporate and let them dry completely before re-packing, but this may not be practical in a multi-day workshop or while traveling. But do at least take the time to open up your brush carrier and let your brushes dry out.
   In addition to the problems of handles cracking or ferrules loosening, leaving brushes stored in a closed carrier can lead to mold. Many watercolor paints contain ingredients like honey or glycerin to help them stay moist. Once you get mold contamination in your brushes or paints, it can be very difficult to eradicate, so it’s best not to give it a chance to get started.
7. Don’t panic if a natural bristle brush gets schmooshed and dries in a wonky shape, just reshape the brush using warm water. If that’s not enough to do the trick, blot the brush to remove excess water and use gum arabic to reshape the bristles and hold them in place. After the brush dries, rinse out the gum arabic as you would sizing from a new brush and all should be well. On rare occasions, I’ve had to repeat the process a few times to completely reshape the brush.
8. Don’t trim your brushes "to get a better point". Occasionally, you will find a brush hair or two sticking straight out to the side, and the warm-water trick doesn’t fix it. In this case, the brush hair may actually be partially broken, and the best solution is to trim that one hair (or two) off at the ferrule. But don’t try to reshape an entire brush by trimming it. It simply doesn’t work. The reason a brush comes to a point is that there are longer hairs in the middle AND that each hair (even synthetic ones) has a natural taper to it. Trimming the brush removes the natural taper and makes it LESS likely that you’ll get a good point.
   To really understand this—and just because it’s fascinating!—watch this video about how watercolor brushes are made. It helps explain why they’re so expensive, too! Lots of steps done by hand and it’s not a simple skill to learn. (If you liked that one, you might also like this longer series on how traditional Chinese brushes are made.)
   There are three common reasons why a brush won’t come to a sharp point:
   a. It’s a poorly made - sigh! There’s no fixing this. The best way to avoid that problem is to buy your brushes (at least the expensive ones) at an art supply store that will let you try the brush in clear water before buying. Even a high-quality brush can be damaged in shipping or by other customers handling it in the store, so this is especially helpful if the brush does not have any sizing or protective cover. It might still be a perfectly good brush, but trying it out will ensure it hasn’t been damaged.
   b. The longest hairs at the tip of the brush have been broken or split. Depending on your style, a good natural-hair or quality brush may last a few months or a lifetime. You have to be pretty rough with it to break a brush down in a few months, but aggressively stabbing at the paper, scrubbing and dry-brushing can be hard on a brush. My solution to this is to use one of the wonderful synthetics or synthetic-natural hair blend brushes on the market today, paint with abandon, and buy a new brush after 2 or 3 years.
   c.  it wasn't designed to have a point  - my favourite brushes are rounded points.
9. Never use your good brushes for applying masking fluid! Masking fluid dries fast and is impossible to remove! 
10. Before using ANY brush for masking, wet it with soap solution. I simply dip my masking brush in water and scrub it around on a bar of soap. I’m especially careful to get some soap worked into the area near the ferrule, to keep masking fluid OUT!
11. Love them and USE them lots! Yes you might wear them out or even better, your brush miles will make you want a better brush - fantastic!!

ciao cari pittori!!

it saddens me that so many people are so creatively blocked.

this is really a telling-off post, so if you are a bit delicate better go and read something else.

Many people come to my workshops and classes and are totally soul destroyed that their painting hasn't worked out.

How do you think i feel when i paint a clunker and have nothing to sell?? how do I put food on the table then McDuff? mamma mia!! What happens when I paint something really fab and it still doesn't sell?? mamma-flipping mia!!

Students invest heavily in a one day workshop and expect to come out with a masterpiece, or they say "I'll see how the day goes and if I paint something really good then I will come to your classes". Erk - hello?

They make up all these weird rules, goals and stories that are really just blocking their creativity and maybe even their lives.

Come on people, time to straighten up - life's not meant to be easy, I'll bet you don't expect to play chopin if you haven't played the piano before. So why is this any different?

I discovered why this morning, and that's why I am sad. I am sad because then you don't have to put any effort in and if you don't put effort in you don't have to face the reality that maybe you are not as creative as you thought you wanted to be. Maybe you can just blame the teacher, "the teacher wasn't good enough to teach me". AGAIN - HELLO? Time for us to take responsibility for ourselves.

The truth is, creativity takes effort and hard work - paintings, sculptures, poems don't just miracle themselves. A true artist works at their skill, develops their ideas, studies and thinks, reworks when things go pear-shaped: creativity takes intellect, creativity takes guts. The not-so secret is creatives are disciplined and have thick skin and are regular failures.

I'm sad you are too scared to have a go.
I'm sad you are too scared to work at it in case you fail.

I challenge you to be kind to yourself and have a go and fail and pick yourself, smile and have another go!!
​
:(

Amanda

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You probably know this - colour mixing in watercolour is vastly different from other mediums. There are several reasons for this, including the fluidity of the medium - water; the watercolour paper; sizing; the pigments; and, the white of the paper. 

To explore colour mixing with water further, water is used to lighten and deepen values and saturates. The more used, the lighter the value; The opposite is also true, the less water used, the stronger the colour, saturation and value. Although there are many ways to paint a watercolour, a process for the beginner watercolour painter to live by is to start your paintings with more water and less pigment, subsequent washes should have less water and more pigment until your final marks are virtually paint straight from the tube!

In addition to using water, the colour we have that's not a colour is the white of the paper. In transparent washes, light travels through the paint to the paper and bounces back and helps to optically lighten values, this is also the reason we use a white palette and not a coloured palette. 

Professional grade watercolour paper is not actually paper at all; Exhibition quality 'paper' is made from cotton rag, versus student papers which are made from wood pulp. Exhibition papers are archival meaning they are acid free and, providing they are kept thoughtfully (not under the bed), in a dry, cool environment, away from direct sunlight they will be perfect for a LONG time!! Framed paintings should be hung away from direct sunlight just like any other artwork in any other medium.

I have to admit I am not an expert on watercolour paper sizing (i'm not much into the science - I just want to paint, so I'm not going to pretend), what I do know is that the sizing helps to keep the paint on the surface of the paper thereby helping to retain your painting's brilliance, lustre and transparency. A good quality paper will be sized to it's core not just on the surface. This means that, from a colour mixing perspective, different papers work differently and will allow the pigment and water to work differently. 
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Although black and white pigments are manufactured, typically, we do not use a black for dark value washes, nor a white to lighten. My reasons for not using black as a wash is because I find it exceedingly boring. For me watercolour is about poetry, there is no poetry in black!!  Watercolour painting is about creating beauty and light and life, as Delacroix said 'Colour is the fruit of life'. I encourage you to step outside and find a dark area and observe the light bouncing around and colours reflecting, treat watercolor as an adventure. I prefer to make my own darks, creating areas of light and dark, warm and cool, opaque and transparent - so much more interesting!! If you are desperate, paint a black painting and get it out of your system! Apart from that, most blacks are created using a kiln firing process and seem to be very sooty, my eyeliner is the only black near me!! I have to admit I LOVE white gouache, I slap it in to darks (with restraint, sometimes not!) just for the fun of it. I also love white marks in a watercolor painting, however, white watercolour and gouache is not so pretty when used as a wash (and unnecessary!) proceed with caution.

There is vast range of watercolour pigments available falling into 4 main categories: transparent, opaque, earth and staining. Many of the pigments are made from natural minerals and due to these natural qualities, react and bounce off each other, quite fun to watch and experiment with.

To give yourself the best shot at painting watercolour, be kind to yourself and buy a set of transparent primaries in a professional grade of paints, however I recommend you seek advice from a specialist watercolour artist before purchasing. 

For a beginner watercolour painter, I recommend just four pigments - get used to them and understand how they mix and work together - do resist the urge to splurge - you will have more fun with a limited palette!! The pigments I suggest are artist quality tube paints, Permanent Alizarin crimson, phthalo blue (or french ultramarine), Indian yellow (or new gamboge) and burnt sienna. The most useful tool you can make for yourself is a colour wheel made from your own pigments. Just choose any yellow, blue and red then mix a purple, orange and green - complimentaries - yellow is opposite purple, green is opposite red and orange is opposite blue.

This is important because the colour wheel, for example, will show you the complementary colour to neutralise a bright/saturate pigment eg neutralise or dull a yellow by adding a touch of purple or it will help you decide which colours to charge into a luscious apple's shadow and which colour to choose to make one colour stand out from another. From these pigments you make a gorgeous silvery (or warm) greys, a luscious rich lively black and a myriad of other colours just with 4 pigments!! You can progress this by mixing a light value colour wheel and then a dark value wheel just by altering the amount of water on your brush.

Colour charging is exciting and frightening all at the same time - while the paper is damp, and without washing your brush, load up another colour and simply 'charge', ( ie slop, slap or drop) this new colour into or next to, the original colour. With watercolour, fewer brush strokes are definitely more, this also works for colour mixing on your paper. When charging in colour use ONE brush stroke - every additional brush stroke is another step toward opaque, 'dead' colour and lost luminosity.

Due to its transparency (even opaque pigments are quite transparent) glazing can be used to modify a value or temperature or simply mix colours. Glazing is washing over a previously painted area, use a soft bristled brush to ensure previous layers are not disturbed. For example, if there was an orange car in the distance but it's too bright and taking over, you could knock it back to the distance by glazing a wash of a blue (or purply-blue) over the orange, its not necessary to be neat just wash over everything that's intended to be in the distance, soften off an edge here or there and you're done! 
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Colours can also be mixed onto dry paper with wet brush/paint (aka wet into dry). Place colours beside each other and catch the bead from the previous mark, the secret is not to touch the same mark again, just keep catching the bead of the previous mark until you get where you're going.

One of the main advantages of watercolour is wet-into-wet painting. For amazing blends of colour, soak a piece of watercolour paper in a 'bath' for no more than 5 minutes, let the drips run off and place the wet paper onto marine ply or gatorboard. The paper will stay wet for sometime and you will be able to paint until it is dry.

Watercolour is the oldest known painting medium - the sistine chapel fresco is a type of watercolour! Think of painting watercolour with a feather - that's all it needs - a gentle touch!!

happy painting miei cari amici xx
Amanda

For more watercolour Paintbox Tips, articles and learning, visit my FREE TO JOIN network for student's of all levels

Come paint with me in Italy
Watercolour for Beginners - Auckland New Zealand
Weekly Classes - Auckland New Zealand
En Plein Air - One Day Workshops


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