Sometimes it does good to let a watercolor set awhile until you have a little more motivation. A perfect example of this is the painting (a work in progress) that has been sitting idle in my studio.

At first, I thought it had been ruined because the board it was attached to broke from stretching the paper. This happened after painting a good portion of the painting. When the board broke, it caused the paper to buckle. However, after cutting it back a bit, I was able to salvage the paper and flatten the buckle, and then I taped the paper onto a different board. This was fortunate because to begin the painting all over again was questionable whether it was worth it or not.

Again, you can almost always salvage a painting, even a watercolor. You just can’t always have it the way you originally thought it would be, but if you “keep the faith,” use your creativity, and apply all your knowledge, you just might save that which you thought was ruined.

In my experience of painting, I’ve picked a few tricks that may be worth passing on…

Painting on a solid white background has always had, at least for me, a somewhat lackluster quality about it. I’m especially thinking of the large white areas in snow paintings, expansive whiteness of skies, and water in misty and foggy pictures.

I prefer to cover the entire paper with clear water and then drop in areas of the three primaries. In this instance, I used scarlet lake, Windsor yellow, and cobalt blue. I allowed the different colors to work around creating a mostly non-white background. I created all the colors in the  painting by using combined mixtures of these three colors. I can still make use of accidental whites which can help emphasize edges, they just are not necessarily pure white. Although, they will appear as such even if they are faint scarlet lake, Windsor yellow, and cobalt blue.

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