Watercolors After a Long Time

My Instagram friend, Alvin Chong, invited me to do a live session with him. It had been a while since we had drawn together, so there was much to catch up in our conversation.

Alvin is quite a fantastic artist, equally skilled with linework and colors. He works as a professional tattoo artist in Malaysia.

I took the opportunity of drawing with him to play with watercolors. I haven’t worked with colors in a long time, and these days I’m trying to get back into the practice.

Here’s what I made.

I think the essential task with watercolors is patience. And it manifests in different ways.

You need to wait for colors to dry. You can’t simply throw color atop color, wash over wash. The colors blend in different ways, depending on how dry they are, and the kind of paper you’re using.

Colors change as they dry. Sometimes it is useful to put a richer color than you would otherwise want. It changes at two times - first, the moment it touches the paper, and interacts with the wetness of the page and other colors around it, and second, upon drying against the paper.

I find that the color looks very different again the next day. This is quite frustrating to me. But watercolors are about letting go of control in various ways, so it’s something to get used to. I will.

Another thing about patience is that you have to give yourself the time to put layers upon layers. Nothing will look exactly the way you want in the first run. You have to prep the base layer, then the middle layers, then the highlights. There is an order to things, light to dark, which means you have to look at your scene and break it down into those properties. It’s a whole different way of looking at your world, than when working in ink. This is jarring to me at this time. But another thing I expect I will understand better with time.

I do not know how far I want to go with colors. I only know that there are certain things I want to be able to do. I hope to get there quickly. I know my heart lies in line work, and I will eventually return to it. But this is a good trick, worth a lot, and I want to master it as well.

It’s always good to see your world in lots of different ways.