Watercolor painting

                                        Contents

Watercolor painting 

        Name’s Origins

        History

        Technique

        Difficulties

My watercolor paintings

Bibliography

Name’s Origins

Watercolor (American English) or watercolor (Commonwealth) and Ireland), also aquarelle from French, is a painting method in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-soluble vehicle. The term “watercolor” refers to both the medium and the resulting artwork.

The traditional and most common support for watercolor

paintings is paper. Other supports include papyrus bark papers, plastics,vellum or leather fabric, wood, and canvas.

Watercolors are usually transparent, and appear luminous because the pigments are laid down in a relatively pure form with few types of filler obscuring the pigment colors.

Vermilion Falls

by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

Cape Code

by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

The term watercolor refers to paints that use water soluble, complex carbohydrates as a binder. Originally (16th to 18th centuries) watercolor binders were sugars and/or hide glues, but since the 19th century the preferred binder is natural gum arabic with glycerin and/or honey as additives to improve plasticity and dissolvability of the binder. 

Modern watercolor paints are now as durable and colorful as oil or acrylic paints, and the recent renewed interest in drawing and multimedia art has also stimulated demand for fine works in watercolor.

“Home sweet home”

 by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

“Pink Roses “

by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

“Rose -red “

by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

“Roses “

by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

 History

Although watercolor painting is extremely old, dating perhaps to the cave paintings of paleolithic Europe, and has been used for manuscript illumination since at least Egyptian times but especially in the European Middle Ages, its continuous history as an art medium begins in the Renaissance. The German Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer (1471–1528) who painted several fine botanical, wildlife and landscape watercolors, is generally considered among the earliest exponents of the medium. 

Botanical artists have always been among the most exacting and accomplished watercolor painters, and even today watercolors—with their unique ability to summarize, clarify and idealize in full color—are used to illustrate scientific and museum publications.

Violet flowers

by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

Among the many 20th-century artists who produced important

works in watercolor, mention must be made of  Wassily Kandinsky,

Emil Nolde , Paul Klee, Egon Schiele and Raul Dufy.

In this period American watercolor painting was often imitative of

European Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, but significant

individualism flourished within “regional” styles of watercolor

painting in the 1920s to 1940s, in particular the “Ohio School” of

painters centered around theCleveland Museum of Art.

Woman in summer

by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

Young woman

by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

Technique

Watercolor painting has the reputation of being quite demanding; it is more accurate to say that watercolor techniques are unique to watercolor. Unlike oil or acrylic painting, where the paints essentially stay where they are put and dry more or less in the form they are applied, water is an active and complex partner in the watercolor painting process, changing both the absorbency and shape of the paper when it is wet and the outlines and appearance of the paint as it dries. 

Difficulties

The difficulty in watercolor painting is almost entirely in learning how to anticipate and leverage the behavior of water, rather than attempting to control or dominate it.

Many difficulties occur because watercolor paints do not have high hiding power, so previous efforts cannot simply be painted over; and the paper support is both absorbent and delicate, so the paints cannot simply be scraped off, like oil paint from a canvas, but must be laboriously  lifted by rewetting and blotting. This often induces in student painters a pronounced and inhibiting anxiety about making an irreversible mistake.

“A Young American Woman”

by Victoria Sara Dazin – aquarelle 47x32CM

Astronomia by Victoria Sara Dazin, inspired by Sandro Boticelli “Giovano introduto tra le Arti Liberali” 1481 ( Detail)
Aquarell 47/33cm

Bibliography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(c) All rights reserved to Victoria Sara Dazin.