Deciding How to Reserve or Recover Whites and Lights in Watercolor

This article is the third in a series. The preceding articles are: Is My Painting Done? Are You a “Photocopier”? There’s a Better Way In response to the last article, a reader made a couple of excellent points about why it’s sometimes difficult to deviate from a reference photo: lack of confidence, and the planning…

In planning an artwork, you often need to conduct related exercises, explorations and experiments. But it’s usually a bad idea to let them slowly morph into unplanned attempts at the artwork.

Try exploring different watercolor effects and “textures” and asking “What does this watercolor effect remind me of? What could I use it to suggest?”