1. Keep two water reservoirs for cleaning your brushes. One for warm colors and one for cool. (This prevents muddiness in your palette).
2. Knowing when to let the layers on your paper dry before further progress is vital.
3. Carry pigment from the bricks to your palette, don't mix pigments in the bricks.
On technique:
1. Experiment adding water to a pigment on your palette (More water == thinner with less Saturation and vice-versa).
2. Experiment with how wet pigments interact with other wet pigments on the paper. (More water == better flow).
3. Experiment with the paper tilt direction (water flows under the force of gravity and this can be used to create a desired affect).
4. Know how to layer (i.e., 1st layer low saturation, broad areas with high water/flow, final layer is fine detail lines with low flow/higher saturation).
5. You must understand the color wheel and how pigments may mix.
I have beef with this guidance:
> let your palette and paint bricks get dirty
Keep your bricks clean: Let your palette get dirty (if you so choose).
> Keep two water reservoirs for cleaning your brushes. One for warm colors and one for cool. (This prevents muddiness in your palette).
I used to do a cup of designated dirty water and a cup of clean water but I can't think on that level when I'm painting. I'm close enough to a sink that I just change it out as needed. Any cup near me when I'm painting is going to get all manner of brushes dunked in it. Yes, I've dunked a paint-loaded brush in my coffee before.
> Knowing when to let the layers on your paper dry before further progress is vital.
Only slightly less vital: knowing when not to let the layers on your paper dry before progressing. But yeah, that one first.
On color : I recently realised (or read somewhere) about the simplest color wheel- if you divide a circle into 6 segments and paint the primaries : {R, Y, B} in non-neighbouring segments, then the ones in between are the secondaries: {R+Y=O, R+B=P, Y+B=G}. Then if you combine primaries and the 'opposite' secondary, you get brown/grey like colors.
Also, I get quite good combinations (palettes) by using a mixture of the same colors, like a red and a green and then a mix of the two to make a grey.
I've thinking about using https://github.com/scrtwpns/pigment-mixing to go from a desired RGB output to the {RGB1, RGB2, percentage) inputs somehow. Would have to be quite rough estimate though, as mixing real paints in exact proportions seems hard.
If you want to get things right, I suggest looking at Peter Donahue's Colordisk. He has several great explainers up on Tiktok (sic.), and he has several variants of his Colordisk freely available (his URL shortening, not mine):
I never realised the colour wheel can be navigated using the ab coordinates from Lab space! That makes so much sense.
I've had trouble remembering what the ab coordinates mean, but if I just imagine them on the colour wheel it's obvious that a goes from torquoise-ish to its complement magenta and b goes orthogonal to that, from purple-blue to its complement yellow.
Thanks, that looks very helpful. I have a 'Pocket color wheel' that works ok, but I see that link has a more sophisticated division of color space. Nice!
RGB are the primary colors used in additive color mixing, CMYK are used as the primary colors for subtractive color mixing which is used in offset printing and similar processes.
In reality, artists often use different base colors anyway. One way to do it is to have 2 versions of the base colors, one warm, one cold. The reason is that for example a greenish blue like Cyan would make it harder to mix vivid violets (by adding a red on the other direction of the color wheel). So you use a greenish blue (Cyan) and a redish blue (e.g. Aquamarine), a blueish red (e.g. Magenta) and a yellow-ish red, and so on.
Don't ruin your acid-free paper by using tap water, use bottled water for everything, including cleaning your brushes (valid for every water-based technic like acrylic, tempera, guache...).
Do you have any advice on how to deal with paper warping?
The paper getting sobby and uneven often quickly brings a painting session to an end :)
And yet in tutorial videos I often see people paint a whole background section in one go (even as much as half the page) without any issues. Do they glue the sheet down to a board?
1) look up videos of "watercolor paper stretching" on youtube, and clamp the paper down if you can (I'll tape all way around a sheet to make a nice border anyways).
2) alternately use watercolor paper blocks (which have adhesive on all sides of the sheet, which minimizes curling)
3) get heavier paper (thicker), use less water, and don't let water pool anywhere.
1. Keep two water reservoirs for cleaning your brushes. One for warm colors and one for cool. (This prevents muddiness in your palette).
2. Knowing when to let the layers on your paper dry before further progress is vital.
3. Carry pigment from the bricks to your palette, don't mix pigments in the bricks.
On technique:
1. Experiment adding water to a pigment on your palette (More water == thinner with less Saturation and vice-versa).
2. Experiment with how wet pigments interact with other wet pigments on the paper. (More water == better flow).
3. Experiment with the paper tilt direction (water flows under the force of gravity and this can be used to create a desired affect).
4. Know how to layer (i.e., 1st layer low saturation, broad areas with high water/flow, final layer is fine detail lines with low flow/higher saturation).
5. You must understand the color wheel and how pigments may mix.
I have beef with this guidance:
> let your palette and paint bricks get dirty
Keep your bricks clean: Let your palette get dirty (if you so choose).