For this week’s Fine Arts Friday art lesson, I used a simple wet-on-wet waterpaint tutorial I found on YouTube.
The artist’s wet-on-wet painting technique really inspired me because he demonstrated several “new” things I hadn’t ever tried with water paints, such as ~
- If your paper is wet, the added wet paint flows out and spreads beautifully. You can paint large areas this way without the dried ‘edges’ showing.
- Wet paint of different colors can be blended together seamlessly on the paper.
- Wet paint can be ‘lifted‘ off the paper with a clean wet brush if it is too dark or the wrong color effect.
- Once dried (he uses a hairdryer) you can paint new water and/ or new paint over the dried paints and paint over them again and again, laying down new layers of color. This helps sharpen and deepen your painting. You can keep re-painting, drying and then adding more detail and colors. This is especially good when doing shadows or creating depth.
- When you want to add deep color and fine details, you can paint denser paint on dry paper or dry paint.
We set up our own little rusty cup with a (struggling little) fern and painted our own rusty cups using these new wet-on-wet paint techniques.
We used ~
- 300gsm water-color paper
- water paints (We used water paints in tubes which have the ‘proper’ color names used by professional artists. May I suggest that it is worth investing in quality products for art and train your children to work with them correctly and carefully. We always share our art materials and they have lasted for years!)
- Quality paint brushes. (Again, see #2 and invest in good brushes!)
- Boards and masking tape. Tape your paper to the board to keep your sheet of paper flat.
- Hair dryer. (Use a low air speed so that you don’t blow your wet paint around on your painting.)
- Jars of clean water and clean cloths or tissues to clean off brushes and spills.
As a mom, the tutorial gave me the confidence to try my hand at the new wet-on-wet painting techniques while ‘helping’ and encouraging my kids with their discoveries. We all thoroughly enjoyed our art lesson!
You can find the “Watercolor demo painting a rusty jug” tutorials here on YouTube ~
Give this lesson a try!