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Introduction to Watercolor

Watercolor was invented in its present form by the Chinese shortly after 100 AD and its history is firmly bound to the history of paper. Papermaking was introduced to Spain by the conquering Moors in the mid-12th century and spread to Italy 25 years later.

The forerunner of watercolor painting was buon fresco painting: wall-painting using watercolor paints on wet plaster. The most famous example of buon fresco is, of course, the Sistine Chapel, begun in 1508 and completed in 1514. In Europe, as early as the 15th century, artists were painting in watercolor.

The American West was an important area in the history of American art, and of watercolor in particular. The majority of the recording of land exploration and people west of the Mississippi was kept by artists whose only means of painting was watercolor.

The reporter/artists of the Civil War created great interest in watercolor. Their on-the-spot drawings of the battlefields were used as illustrations in the newspapers and magazines of the day, the most famous being Harper's Weekly.

Unlike the American artists, who regarded watercolor as a draft-type technique, English artists of the mid-1700s had already elevated watercolor to a serious medium equal to oil.

In England, watercolor was first used by architectural draftsmen and topographers, but soon watercolorists were introducing figures into their compositions. It took the genius of Winslow Homer to reveal to American artists the extraordinary potential of watercolor as a serious expressive medium. Once accepted, watercolor became an inevitable medium for the American painter. Watercolor's inherent luminosity, combined with its capacity for rapid execution, gave landscape painters an ideal means for recording the fleeting facets of nature.

It is said, and you can take this with a grain of salt, that it takes a Chinese watercolor artist more than fifteen years to learn to handle his brushes and lay a wash and then, only then, when he has achieved this high degree of skill, is he allowed to paint a picture.

Looking at the delightful and spontaneously fresh results they arrive at can be disheartening to anybody unfamiliar with watercolors. If it is going to take so long to master why should we, mere beginners, bother? What do we students stand to get out of it? Nothing but pain and frustration probably ...

But in fact this is not so. The nature of the watercolor media will serve you very well indeed if you are not over-concerned with an elaborate technique. Therefore once you understand its nature you can use it without fear and with great enjoyment.

What Is Watercolor? Watercolor can be roughly divided into pure or transparent color and opaque color.

Watercolors are made with pure pigment mixed with gums or glues, usually gum arabic for transparent color and gums and emulsions for opaque color. The emulsions here would be egg yolk, casein and linseed oil and glue (parchment clippings). The gums would probably be a size made from rabbit skin, parchment clippings, gum arabic or gum tragacanth.

All the colors used in painting start off first as a powder made from a vegetable or mineral base. If you add water to the powder, you could produce washes and paint with them. However, when they are dried, the color would return to being powder and fall off.

To hold the powder together and cause it to stick permanently to the paper or canvas you have to use a binder in order to fix them. In watercolors you use those binders that will dissolve in water, i.e. glues and emulsions. In oil paint you bind the pigments with oils and these are dissolved in turpentine.

Pastels come in powder form too. The binder is usually gum tragacanth. They are rolled out into sticks and left to dry.

White is not used in transparent watercolor. The paper itself acts as the white. You will see that the more fluidly you handle transparent watercolor, the more brilliant are your results; and in any pure white passages the paper is left untouched. The more you over-paint the less brilliant your work becomes.

With opaque watercolor it is different. You can use opaque colors transparently or not as you wish, by thinning with more water. White can be used constantly for over-painting and for reworking any passages. Most opaque color has a white base added to it and in the cheaper variety this tends to become chalky and dead-looking.

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Introduction to Watercolor

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