From Design to Plan—Painting Sequence
Once you have a design for a watercolor, you still need to figure out things like:
- size (and maybe format)
- how to create a roadmap for where to place things on the page
- what to paint wet-in-wet or wet-on-dry
- what techniques you want to use for various things in the painting
- what order to do things (painting sequence)
- how to reserve whites and lights
In this video, we’ll look at a “default” strategy for deciding on the painting sequence. We’ll look at two examples where the default strategy was used to create a painting sequence. And then we’ll apply the default strategy to our two designs from the last video to see where we might run into problems.
In the process we’ll discover that design 1 is actually the more challenging painting, and why. We’ll use our default strategy to create a plan for design 2. (In the next video, we’ll continue to work on solutions to the challenges in design 1.)
(Seeing these two examples may also help you see more clearly which situations might look easy, but actually be pretty challenging in watercolor.)
Videos mentioned in this video, in case you want to catch up:
- Previous video, where the two designs were created: Using Reference Photos More Creatively
- Video with the silhouette painting strategy: Three Strategies for Designing Your Own Paintings
- Video for example 1, if you want to see the whole painting sequence: Backlit Clouds Postcard Paint-Along
- Video for example 2: Crazy Colorful Pears Postcard Paint-Along
- Watercolor Skies and Clouds Project 1 (for the method of re-wetting a sky to lay another soft-edged layer)
