Table of Contents
Watercolor Tricks &Techniques—for Today
This section covers the various ways to incorporate liquid aids into your paintings, exploring their effects as you go along. Some of these you may already have tried (liquid mask, inks and alcohol); some are old standbys (gum arabic, soap); others may be new to you (granulating, metallic and gel mediums), as new materials and supplies are constantly being introduced in the marketplace. This section will keep you on your toes, and give you new avenues to explore.
There are a number of non-liquid aids that will help add life, color, texture, and an individual stamp to your work. In this section, you will experiment to find the ones that work best for you. These dry helpers include the watercolor paper itself, as well as drafting and masking tape, tissues and paper towels, aluminum foil, waxed paper, plastic wrap, and more.
Broadly speaking, a watercolorist’s “tools” include everything from paper and pigments to the artist’s unique vision of the world. In this section, “tools” means those things you hold in your hand and paint with, mark with, scratch or scrape with, or otherwise use to cause an image to appear on your paper. In this section, you’ll see a wide variety of tools and all the different effects they produce.