Art 105: Painting with a Waterbrush

Your questions, answered

I had a great question from one of you last week about how, exactly, to use a waterbrush. The question had to do with how hard it is to control exactly how much water comes out, which means that you can end up with an unsightly puddle of water on your paper.

So below is a quick demo of how I use a waterbrush. My techniques are:

• Squeeze a little water out of the brush and onto the paint to get it wet and ready to use, and/or:

• Squeeze a little water out of the brush and onto the palette to mix with paint until you have the right consistency. Watercolor artists talk about tea, milk, and honey—a tea mixture is very watery, milk is somewhere in the middle, and honey is very rich and thick and will give you lots of bold, saturated color.

• To clean the brush between colors, squeeze some water out onto a rag or onto the ground

• Be aware that you can accidentally draw pigment back up into the brush, which can contaminate the next color you want to use. I demonstrated that in the video—it’s best to fi…