Water colors, is a painting method in which the paints are made of special pigments suspended in a water-based solution. Water colors are mostly used for landscape and portrait paintings or small-scale studies of complex paintings. Water colors also work well with colored pencils for creating mixed media pieces. My past experience with water colors hasn’t been much, but this Christmas I got the chance to get my hands on a watercolor palette. I hope to create more projects using watercolors.
Watercolors are extremely old, dating to the cave paintings of Paleolithic Europe, and have been used for manuscript illustration since at least Egyptian times but especially in the European Middle Ages, however its history as an art medium begins with in the Renaissance. Watercolors then came to western artists in the 1400s. Artists had to formulate, prepare and grind their own watercolor paints and tended to keep their secret recipes and methods to themselves. While then in the 18th century watercolors began to come up in shops in major European cities. Nowadays you can easily go into most and get your hands on watercolors that are all ready to use. I really like watercolors because they are considered a unique way to creatively represent dreams, illusions and bright feelings. Not only watercolors can blend well together but they add a lot of details to art pieces. A lot of people think water colors paintings can’t make a living for artists but one of the most expensive watercolor pieces sold was 11.4 million dollars from an artist called “The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise” by JMW Turner in 1842.
My past experiences with water colors haven’t been too much. I’ve done multiple little projects in elementary art classes with watercolor, but now I’ve been using them a lot more and it is one of my new favorite painting techniques. Some easy and fun projects I have been doing in my free time are good for beginners is just drawing squiggles and shapes. After you have done those you can add little details like hands, feet or faces to make creatures. I hope to create a landscape or face painting with watercolors as it really shows the different shades and pigments of the paints to add more detail and depth to them. In my past years of being part of 4H I’ve always done projects in the painting categories, and I’ve always used acrylics. Last year my face painting made it to the Iowa State Fair and I hope this year I can recreate it while using watercolor paints. From setting your goals to even something little watercolors it really encourages you to try new things.