How do you lighten watercolor?
When you start working with watercolor, you come across situations where you want to go lighter with your paint color! When it comes to acrylic or oil paint, you add white to lighten colors. When you are working with color pencils or pens, you press lightly to acheive a lighter color. But what about when you want to lighten watercolor?
Just add water.
It’s that simple….well almost that simple. Remember that when you add water, you now have more total liquid in your brush. In addition, the thickness of the liquid is a little different.
Here’s how to make the best transition to a lighter shade of watercolor paint:
*In this description, I’m working with watercolor tube paint that I have squeezed out into my palette and allowed to dry.
Start by loading your brush up with very thick paint. Do this by dipping your brush in water and pulling your bristles across your watercolor paint.
Once you have a good amount of paint in your brush, paint a little square onto your paper to see how dark your pure watercolor paint is. You have added enough water to activate the paint and pull it out onto your brush but no more than that!
Then dip your brush in your water and rub your brush gently onto an empty space in your palette.
Now with that new paint mixture, paint another square next to your first one. What you will immediately notice is that you have a much juicier square. You have a lot more paint on the paper! This is because when you added water, you ended up with more liquid in your brush.
I’ve found that its harder to manage paint when you have so much of it flowing out of your brush onto the paper. To take it down a notch, touch the tip of your brush to a damp paper towel and allow a little bit of paint to leave the bristles.
Now paint another square onto your paper. What you will see with this square is the same lightness of color but less paint.
Now let’s go lighter!
Add more water by gently dipping your brush into the water. Don’t swirl it around too much since you don’t want to lose any paint into your water cup. You just want to soak up more water into the bristles of your brush. After you dip into your water, rub your bristles onto an empty space on your palette. This will mix the paint that was in your brush with the water you just added.
Just like before, let some of the new paint mixture escape your brush by touching the bristles to a damp paper towel.
Now you have a medium amount of lightened paint in your brush. Paint another square!
You can see a gradient forming with your darkest, boldest color in your first square, and your palest color in the last square. Let’s go one shade lighter to finish up! Once again, gently dip your brush into your water, rub that mixture onto your palette, and touch the tip of the bristles to a damp paper towel. Now paint the last square!
Now you know how to lighten watercolor paint! If you try this exercise and want to share your work, post it to social media and tag me (@joannajenkinsonart) so I can see what you learned.