Watercolor mistakes: how to make valuable changes to your background

SUMMARY: How to fix watercolor mistakes in your background and things to avoid along the way.

A big part of painting is figuring out how to move forward when things don’t go as planned.

With watercolors, it helps to have a positive attitude about all the happy accidents that the water gifts you.

But sometimes, you still would like to know how to fix your watercolor mistakes.

In this video Arts of Course watercolor coach Jess Rice demonstrates how you can change your background if you don’t like it… and things to avoid when you fix your watercolor mistakes.

Rough video transcript

Today. I will show you how to fix the background in your painting.

I'm Jess Rice. I'm an art teacher, and beginners are my specialty.

Sometimes when I complete a painting, I look at it for a little bit longer, and I see things in it that I'd like to change a little bit. Watercolors are really nice for that because you can go back in fairly easily and change things in your watercolor. If I look at this watercolor, I've been looking at it for a while now.

There's a couple of areas in it that I want to change. It's mainly back here in the background. There's this shape here that kind of goes round my tulip, and this round shape right here at the tip there is a little bit distracting, I think my eye keeps getting drawn right to them, and that's not really where I want to look.

So I have to come in a little bit darker with that and take all that out. It's got to go a little bit darker around that tulip as well. Also, my painting is too much the same all the way through the background. So, I want to change this corner up a little bit, make it a little bit darker, especially up against my tulip.

So, to begin with, my tulip’s completely dry and dried off. It's warm to the touch. So, I'm working wet paint onto dry paper. So, to fix this area, I don't want to lose any of that color underneath. I just want to go over the top of it a little bit and change it up. I'm going to mix up a nice purple, a little bit of ultramarine and a little bit of a Alizarin Crimson, just want to darken up.

Mainly I want to kind of do the complementary color of this yellow. And the complementary color of yellow is purple. So, I just want to do a nice complementary color up against that tulip leaf right there. The tulip petal… lots of pigment out here. My pigment’s nice and rich. I got lots of water in it. I've mixed up enough that I can do my whole area here.

I'm not going to have to go back in and remix color. I've got a big enough pool going. Really load my brush up cut right up next year to a petal. Make sure you have enough water in your brush to carry all the way around that and a little bit down here. I'm going to rinse my brush and I'm going to pull that color off a little bit.

Try not to go back over what I just laid down. I don't want to go back over that first layer. I’m going to turn my page so I can have easier access to this side.

Pull off that color. Keep pulling around your tulip until your edges are clear.

One of the reasons I don't want to go back and touch any of this is because now that I've added water to this or made it wet, that first layer kind of lifts again and kind of starts reshuffling the pigment. If I just leave it alone, it'll all come right back down where it was and you'll have nice color underneath all of this.

If I went back and redid it, if I went over that again with my brush, I'd have a dead area there because I've mixed all those colors together again. It's one of the things with watercolors that you have to be a little bit careful with, but it's a good thing to learn right off the bat. Don't overwork your watercolors.

Let's place the color down and then work it out to the edges until you're clear. If you don't like what you did here, if you want to make it even darker, I'd probably dry this corner off and then I'd come back and hit it one more time. I don't want to add color to it now because it'll start reacting with that bottom layer and kind of mix all that color together again.

I'll kind of have a dead area here. So, I'm going to dry this all off and I can hit this area again with a little darker color.

So I've dried that all off. Now my paper's all dry again. So now I want to start in this corner up just a little bit more. Lots of my color mixed up here.

Just grab a little bit more, make sure I'm nice and rich. Let's start from this corner.

And start feathering off that side.

Again, I'm not going back over that original area that I painted I want to have just a little bit between here just to connect those all together, and I can feather that out a little bit. Trying to get rid of those hard edges on there. One area that can be a little bit tricky is when you cross an area, you want to make sure that the background is the same on both sides.

So I want to make sure that I match that same color on the other side. There and make it look like the background is passing behind an object I come all the way down here to the bottom to make sure I don't have a hard line on there anywhere. All right. I like this darker corner much better. It's not all the same all the way through here.

It just reads a little bit better. And it really punches my tulip up a little bit more. So that's how you'll fix a background by going just a little bit darker with it, working wet paint on a dry paper.

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Categories: Watercolor Techniques, Watercolor tips