Passing through New Orleans International Airport this weekend, I spent some time at the departure gate sketching fellow passengers. It’s surprisingly hard to do, but they say practice makes perfect.
Illustration: Watercolor and pen-and-ink by Black Elephant Blog author
A useful book has meanwhile fallen into my hands called Transparent Watercolor Wheel: A Logical and Easy-to-Use System for Taking the Guesswork Out of Mixing Colors. This unfortunately out-of-print (and therefore often expensive) book is by Jim Kosvanec, whose many watercolor paintings he includes in the book are of native peoples in the region of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (discussed elsewhere here on this blog), where he lived and worked at the time of this book’s publication in 1994 and apparently where he still lives and works.
Illustration: Photo by Black Elephant Blog author of cover of book, Transparent Watercolor Wheel by Jim Kosvanec
The book is perfect for those who are curious about the differences between transparent, semi-transparent, semi-opaque, and opaque watercolors, and also gives one an excellent sense of which watercolors to use (based on top brands prevailing in 1994 at least) and how to mix them. There are instructions, for instance, on how to produce light, medium, and dark-value grays, as below.
As in anything else one undertakes, the further you get into this subject the more you realize there is to learn…which makes it all the more challenging and fun.
Illustration: Swatches of gray mixtures by Black Elephant Blog author
There are no hard and fast rules, of course; we are talk about art after all, not science, but the book’s a great opportunity to get up-to-speed on some of the different effects people seek to achieve with watercolor. To achieve transparency in watercolor (and perhaps in anything) requires experience, expertise, and experimentation…and practice! I’ve got a way to go on this.
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