Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Tuesday's Tips and Techniques for Watercolor Painting

Sparkly Medium
In honor of the upcoming holiday season and to celebrate the first day of December, I decided to make today's tip about Iridescent Medium. There are a variety of mediums available for watercolor painting and Winsor & Newton make several I really like. I rarely use them, but they are fun to play with and explore. Hand painted Christmas cards are perfect for using the Iridescent Medium. Angel wings, dresses, Christmas ornaments painted in watercolor on paper can become magical and sparkly with just a little bit of medium.

First I mix a small puddles of the colors I plan to use in my painting on my palette. Then I pour a small drop of the Iridescent Medium the size of a dime or less onto my palette near the colors I want to mix with the medium. With a wet brush, I will pick up some of the medium and mix it into my puddle of color. Add a little more water if you want the color to be lighter. If you want the color to be a little darker, I suggest using a separate brush to get more color, so you don't contaminate your main palette color with sparkles.

I added the Iridescent Medium to the blue of the ornament ball shown here. I also added a little to the yellow I used to paint the cap on the ornament. I know it doesn't show up too well in the photo, but it looks so pretty and sparkly in person. The iridescent medium has a very fine sparkle to it. It is very easy to mix with watercolor paint.

Just remember to clean your brush well when you are done to remove all the glitter. You don't want to be painting a landscape or a portrait later on and find out things are sparkling when they shouldn't be.

This is definitely a fun watercolor medium to explore!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Oh wow, how cool! I had no idea there was a sparkly medium for watercolors!! That tickles my fancy!

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin