If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen that I have been on a Jake Winkle Watercolour workshop.
Jake Winkle’s watercolour workshop was a master class of wet-in-wet technique. A technique that I have been trying very hard to replicate for years. Jake’s secret is to use sticky paint!
Painting wet into wet increase the cauliflower effect as you can’t add wetter paint to a wet area of watercolour. The water will flood the area and expand without control, producing ugly cauliflowers. The answer is to increase the amount of pigment, reducing the water and making the paint less likely to expand and flood across the image.
Jake illustrated this very well with a practise exercise of filing a rectangle with very wet colour and increasing the amount of pigment in the watercolour until the point the paint was more pigment than water – and very sticky.
But the revelation in the workshop was also to adjust the colour. Adding pigment from one colour in watercolour will make the paint more saturated but not darker. Jake showed how to use different hues of the same colour to deepen the tone. Adding light red to orange – ultramarine to cobalt blue and green to ultramarine. Sticky blacks were created with Ultramarine and burnt umber.
The project for the day was a cheater. This was traced onto watercolour – while I prefer to draw my own images the tight timing in a workshop makes tracing a good opportunity to achieve results quickly.
We started with the eye and nose on the face and then quickly moved onto the body of the cheater. The body was completed wet-into-wet, starting with light washed to establish warm and cool areas. Into the washes darker and more pigments colour was added until the washes were almost dry. Then the fun bit of adding the cheaters spots using very sticky paint.
The head was completed in much the same way. Wetting the whole head and using the same palette of colours building up layers of tone following the reference image looking for warm, cool, light and dark areas.
I’m happy with the result of the image and more than happy to finally understand what it takes to produce wet-into-wet image. I’m sure I will be trying this again, and to encourage us Jake sent us away with an image of a dog to complete in our own time!
Timelapse of the day!
