Watercolor Painting for Dummies Read Online Free PDF

measured by their width.
    If you’re a more ambitious beginner or when you’re more experienced, you can try using these brushes:
    Mop: As its name implies, this brush is great for mopping in big sky backgrounds, lifting clouds, and making trees.
    Fan: These fans won’t applaud when you walk in the room. You use them to paint bushes and grasses.
    Filbert: This flat brush has curved corners and is good for painting trees and clouds.
    Shader: This angular brush is useful for making wide strokes, or you can use just the point on its tip for small areas.
    Brite: The short hairs make this a good brush for scrubbing and lifting off color.
    Expand your brush collection as you continue to paint. After you’ve been painting a while, you’ll know what you’re lacking and can see what newfangled inventions may give you a creative boost.

Picking out your paper
    Let me be direct for a moment: You do
not
want to skimp on paper quality. Cheap paper can’t take the abuse required of watercolor. Good watercolor paper is made of 100 percent cotton rag, acid-free content. (Acid-free is important because it ensures your paper won’t turn yellow.) It lasts a very long time — it’s been found in Egyptian tombs in good condition!

    A ratty edge, called a
deckle,
is a sign of high-quality, handmade paper. Straight, even edges indicate machine-made paper. Handmade papers are really nice, but you can also find some nice machine-made papers. I use both. Just go with whatever you prefer or can afford.
    Watercolor paper is typically white, whether that’s bright white or natural white. White provides the most reflected light though transparent color. You can get colored paper in tan, blue, gray, and pink that makes for an interesting background color.
    In the following sections, I clue you in on the basics of watercolor paper, such as size, weight, and texture, and provide advice for what you need to get started and to complete the projects in this book.
    Selecting sheets, blocks, or pads
    Individual sheets are a popular way to buy watercolor paper. Sheets of paper come in different sizes:
    Full sheet is 22 x 30 inches.
    Elephant is 29 x 41 inches.
    Double elephant is 40 x 60 inches.
    In addition to sheets, you can purchase paper in convenient pads and blocks:
    A pad
is several sheets bound with a wire spiral or glue at one end. You can paint while the paper is still attached to the pad, or you can tear off one sheet at a time to use. The edge usually tears out pretty neatly. Paper in wire-bound pads usually has a perforated edge, so the tear-out is clean. You can use scissors to cut the paper to the size you need, though I usually tear the paper as described in the “Dividing your paper for smaller paintings” section later in the chapter. If you end up framing the painting, a mat usually covers the edges, so how they look doesn’t matter that much.
    A block contains a number of sheets and is glued on all four sides. You paint on the top sheet and remove it with something dull (a plastic knife or credit card works great) when you’re finished to reveal the next clean sheet.
    You can also buy rolls of paper, which are usually 44 to 56 inches wide by 10 yards long, if you want to paint a mural.
    Dropping acid
    Paper is made from fiber suspended in a slurry. Acid comes from wood fiber and is called
lignon.
Lignon causes paper to yellow and get brittle with age. Acid-free paper is lignon-free.
    Remember the newspaper you left in the driveway for a week? It probably turned yellow because newsprint is highly acidic. So don’t store your watercolors or your watercolor paper near newspaper or even the brown paper that watercolor paper sometimes comes wrapped in.
    Getting to the weight of the matter
    The manufacturer weighs a
ream
of 500 sheets of paper in its uncut state and gives it a number to indicate the paper’s weight.
Weight
indicates the quality (and usually the price) of the paper. Typical weights for watercolor paper are:
    90-pound