The Role of Water in Watercolour

I'll be teaching a series of watercolour classes on January 17th, and one thing about teaching watercolour is that it forces me to learn to articulate how I paint. It's hard to do sometimes, when my hands have been guided by my eyes & heart, to verbalize those techniques, and I stutter and stumble and use goofy words to describe it. I teach best by demonstration.

This afternoon I was warming up with this splash of poppies and this sentence came to me; one I'll be using in my next class: Water creates movement.

The more water, the more movement. I love adding a stroke of wet, wet water to my paper surface and see the pigment chase the flow, mingling and coming alive. A dry brush may give control, but a wet brush is just so much more exciting!