how to Fix washed out or too dark watercolors
Watercolors are unlike any other painting medium. One color, plus a little water, can provide you with a whole range of values, whereas acrylics or oils need to be mixed with other paint colors (white, black or gray) to achieve lighter or darker values of the color.
Because of this watercolors can be much easier to use from a color-mixing perspective, but on the other hand, more challenging if you don’t know how much water or paint to use to achieve the right value. And, to make matters a bit more difficult, watercolor paint dries LIGHTER than it looks when first applied to paper, so what you THINK is the right value, might not be in the end.
In today’s blog video, I go through this extremely helpful exercise which is used by a lot of watercolor artists to help gauge how much water you need to add to your paint to get the right value of color. You can use this exercise - which is called the Tea to Butter Method - to really fine tune your understanding of your paints and how they will look depending on the paint to water ratio.
Some things to keep in mind:
Universal Use: The Tea to Butter method is useful across all colors. However, you’ll see the biggest differences in values with pigment rich colors like blues and reds, vs. yellows.
Let it Dry: Because watercolors dry lighter than they look when first applied, wait for your paint to dry to really understand what color value you can expect.
Get Intimate with Your Palette: If you want to know how to really get the right values with each and every color, do this exercise with each color…and even consider adding in-between values between the tea and coffee, coffee and milk, milk and cream, and cream and butter. The 5 value scale is a great starting point, but color values are much more varied than just the 5.
To apply this method, watch the video below.
0:00 Introduction
0:10 Paint to Water Ratio / Water to Paint Ratio
0:35 Tea to Butter Method
1:00 Draw 5 Squares
1:40 Tea Consistency
2:28 Coffee Consistency
2:55 Milk Consistency
3:50 Cream Consistency
4:30 Butter Consistency
Have you tried the tea to butter method? Has it helped you? Let me know in the comments below how it has helped you.
Keep calm and watercolor on,
