Painting Expressive Watercolours. Mike Chaplin
tools as you need them is the sensible approach.
PULTENEY BRIDGE, BATH
45.5 × 58.5cm (18 × 23in)
This elegant façade presented me with the chance to employ classical techniques of loose, subtle washes backed up with minimal drawing. The size of this painting made it more easily done as a studio piece.
Paints
With paints, you really do get what you pay for. There are ways to save money on equipment (see here), but using student quality rather than artist’s quality paints is a false economy. The latter are much more luminous and as the colour is far stronger you get greater covering power, making the difference in price less than it appears to be.
There is not much to choose between the cost of paint in pans or tubes. Pans are more useful for travelling and although half pans and full pans are the most commonly found, you can also buy quarter pans if weight is a problem and you do not expect to use large amounts. I use 15 ml tubes in the studio but when I am away from home I duplicate the favourite colours in my box with 5 ml tubes which can be left behind at the hotel. If the paint in the pans is running low I just squirt some more from the tube into the pans. Within an hour or two a skin forms on top and I can safely fold up the box and put it in my pocket for the next foray.
On tubes you will find information as to whether the colours are permanent or fugitive, but to discover whether paints are granulating, staining, opaque or transparent you will need to consult a manufacturer’s chart. A printed one has limitations, and to see the true quality of the colours it is worth paying for a handpainted one. Most manufacturers supply these at a cost of about £5, a price you will probably save by purchasing exactly the right pigments.
A versatile palette
Red, blue and yellow are the basics, but ideally you should have cool and warm versions of each. Mixing a green from a cool blue and a hot yellow will make a muddy colour, as will mixing a greeny blue with a red to make a mauve, so provide yourself with sufficient pigments to mix subtle, fresh colours. Including a dark red and a dark blue will allow you to increase the tonal range.
My own basic palette, following these principles, consists of Cadmium Red, Magenta and Permanent Mauve; Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Deep and Raw Sienna; and Coeruleum, French Ultramarine and Indigo. Because I use a lot of dark colour I also add Burnt Umber, Ivory Black and Hooker’s Green Dark.
I am a hoarder of paints, but you do not need this many and a superabundance can be a disadvantage. Build your collection slowly, adding to it only when you need to.
Brushes
There is no specific set of brushes that will suit every artist; brushes are designed to do a particular job, so you will collect a range that are able to make the marks you want.
The best-quality brushes are made of kolinsky sable. Each hair from this animal is thin at the base, broadens out and then comes to a fine point, so a kolinsky sable brush naturally makes a bellied shape that can come almost to a single-hair point. It makes an excellent drawing tool because it will hold a lot of water, allowing you to work without frequently dipping into the palette with all the potential changes of tone and colour that could cause.
For dry brushwork skimmed across the surface of the paper, a stiff brush is useful. These tend to be made of synthetic fibres and they have the disadvantage that, because each hair is very smooth, when you touch the paper the paint tends to flood out of the brush much more quickly than from a hair brush, which has a slightly roughened surface. However, if you like to scrub paint on to give texture, a synthetic brush is cheap and more expendable than a kolinsky sable. The alternative is a brush that is a mixture of synthetic and hair, which has some of the flexibility and water-holding capacity of a sable but will stand much more vigorous use.
Brushes made of other animal hair do not have the springiness of a sable, but used vertically for laying large washes they are ideal; even shaving brushes and housepainter’s brushes have their place, depending on the marks you wish to make.
Caring for your brushes
A good kolinsky sable is about £80, so you will want to look after your brushes properly. When you finish working, wash each brush out very thoroughly; if you leave pigment deep in the belly of the brush it will build up and the brush will lose all its resilience.
Washing removes the natural oils, so squeeze a small amount of hair conditioner into the palm of your hand and gently roll the brush around in it. Leave it for a few minutes then rinse well. Reshape the brush by hand, dry off excess moisture with a tissue and allow to dry upright in a well-ventilated area, preferably not in direct sunlight. If you are storing brushes long-term, put some mothballs with them.
Most artists accumulate a large number of brushes. Although these are among my collection, in practice I use the same three brushes nearly all the time.
| FOCUS ON…grinding paint |
Making your own paint is a lot of work but it gives you complete control over how coarsely or finely it is ground, so if you are interested in granulated or textured paint it is ideal. The other big advantage is that you can have large amounts of paint in pots broad enough to get the widest hake into, which encourages you to think larger.
Pigments can sometimes be bought from an art supplies shop, but if your local shop does not stock them, ask for the address of an artist’s colourman. Although most pigments are non-toxic there are a few that are dangerous; avoid inhaling any of them. Some can be irritant to the skin so, if you are susceptible, wear rubber gloves.
The main constituent of the binder is gum arabic, which exudes from the bark of the acacia tree. It is hygroscopic, which means that it absorbs water, so as a medium for making watercolour it performs two functions: it sticks the pigment to the paper but it will also reconstitute very readily as paint because it will attract water.
Gum arabic tends to dry out in the paint and is quite brittle, so the other main ingredient is glycerine, which keeps the paint soluble. You can also use honey, which gives smoothness to the paint, in a 50:50 mix with the glycerine. This viscous mixture would be difficult to spread, so ox gall is added as a wetting agent. Finally, to prevent mould, you need some vinegar or oil of cloves.
Pigments
Pigments are supplied as dry powder in a bag, minimum amount 50g (2 oz). The cost ranges from about £4 to £30 per 450g (1 lb). The powder is very fine, so do not tip it out of the bag – lift it out carefully with a spoon or palette knife.
Grinding the paint
It is difficult to find a recipe for grinding paint and you will learn mainly by experience, but my method is to use four parts of gum arabic to one part of glycerine or glycerine mixed with honey, with a few drops of ox gall and vinegar. You can either make a stock solution of all those ingredients and store it in a bottle, or make a pile of pigment and add the ingredients separately to it. The binder will keep