Free Watercolor Painting for Dummies by Colette Pitcher Page B

you want lifted is light enough when it’s dry before trying to lift more paint.

Layering on top
    You can, and often will want to, paint on top of other paint. You usually wait until the
underlayer
is dry before adding another layer of paint.
    What you put on top influences what is underneath, and layering is one way to mix colors. Keep the paint transparent so you can see through it and into the layers. This makes deep, interesting paintings.

    Create several rainbows of color with this layering exercise.
    1. Get a quarter sheet of watercolor paper.
    This can be a square piece of paper.
    2. Activate all your paints.
    You want to become familiar with the entire palette of colors, so use them all.
    3. Paint a stripe of each color on your palette from the top of the paper to the bottom, leaving a small stripe of white between each color so they don’t mingle (see Figure 3-8a).
    A 1/2-inch flat brush is just the right width for each stripe. Keep the colors strong by not diluting them with too much water. You could make another chart with pale colors and see what happens with those, too.
    Figure 3-8: Exploring your palette by making a layer chart.

    4. Let the stripes dry completely.
    Use a blow-dryer, or be patient and make a cup of tea.
    5. Paint a stripe of each color horizontally, moving left to right across the paper (or right to left, your preference). See Figure 3-8b.
    This puts each color underneath and over the top of all the others.
    6. Let the paint dry and analyze the results.
    7. Label the paint names for a handy reference chart.
    This simple chart gives you a wealth of knowledge about colors and color combinations. Each intersection displays a new color. Look at the differences when a color is on top of rather than underneath another color. Some colors are
transparent
(see-through); others are
opaque
(solid), no matter how much water you dilute them with.
    For bonus points, try lifting a small area out of each stripe of color (the previous section tells you how). This shows you which colors are easy to remove and which are staining. The staining colors never lift back to white.

Glazing over (Nope, not bored looks)
    A
glaze
is a very transparent layer of paint applied over an area that’s already painted. Glazing has lots of possibilities. You can glaze over an area to make it less or more prominent. If you’re painting a landscape and the background isn’t staying far enough back, you can glaze over the whole area with a cool color, like blue, because cool colors recede. Conversely, you can glaze over the foreground with a warm color, like yellow, to make it come forward. (I talk about color temperatures in Chapter 5.) You may find other reasons to add a glaze over something. I added a yellow glaze to the foreground of the painting in Figure 3-9a to add depth to the painting. Figure 3-9b shows the result.
    Figure 3-9: Before (a) and after (b) a yellow glaze was applied to the foreground.

    To glaze:
    1. Mix enough paint so you don’t have to stop midway and mix more — that’s a sure recipe for hard edges where you hadn’t planned any.
    2. Make the paint as transparent as possible.
    Glazes are usually very transparent (add more water for more transparency) unless you want to obliterate what’s underneath.
    3. Use the biggest brush you can manipulate into the space and apply the transparent glaze.
    Don’t go over the area more than you need to avoid disturbing the layer underneath. If the layer beneath starts to move, stop or endure the change.

    Some colors run when you put water on top of them, so work very quickly and use the lightest of touches so as not to disturb what lies underneath.
    Some papers tolerate glazing better than others. Glazing requires a paper with less lifting ability (see the “One, two, three, lift!” section for more on these papers).

Finishing Up
    When you finish your painting, you can do several things with it. No, you can’t toss it. How will you know how you’ve improved