Create Shading With Watercolor
How do you create highlights and shading with watercolor? We’ve looked at shading before when we talked about turning simple shapes into forms. Today we’re going to do it with watercolor rather than graphite.
With watercolor you need to know a few different techniques and some new terminology.
Let’s Watercolor Stacked Rocks
Let’s do a hands-on project and do a simple painting of some stacked river rocks.
The first thing we’re going to do is make a very light pencil sketch of the rocks; sort of a map of where we’re headed. The next step is to do a very light, simple, wash on all of the rocks. There’s our first new term — wash. A watercolor wash is a very light overall color that is our background color.
DANIEL SMITH 285610005 Extra Fine Essentials Introductory Watercolor, 6 Tubes, 5ml
Watercolor Shading: Washes and Glazing
A wash can be either wet or dry. A dry wash which means your brush is not super wet and it’ll give kind of a stuttered feeling across the paper, leaving a little texture behind. A wet wash means there’s a little bit more water involved, and it gives a more even coating across the paper. With our rocks, we’re going to begin with a wet wash as our stacked rocks are smooth river rocks. Consider using a dry wash if you’re painting something with a rough texture: a rocky mountainside or the skin on an elephant maybe.
Pentel Arts Aquash Water Brush Assorted Tips, 4 Pack Carded (FRHBP4M)Let that first wash dry completely.
Now we’re going to go back in and begin to darken our rocks. Adding wet watercolor over dry is called glazing. And when you put wet over dry what we’re doing is called glazing. Watercolors are great at this because they’re naturally transparent — the under color will show through. Work slowly until you have the color built up where you want it.
Be careful not to overwork an area. If your glazing layer is too wet, it will re-wet the under layers and lighten rather than darken!
My favorite watercolor set is this Daniel Smith set below. The colors are highly pigmented and smooth. This particular set is great to get you started as it has both warm and cool primaries — you can mix almost any color using just these 6!
Shading: Natural and Cast Shadows
With the natural shadows, begin at the darkest spot and work your way up. Blend as you go. The edge closest to the light source should just blend with the rest of the rock — no hard edge! If your shadow isn’t dark enough yet, add glazing layers until it is. Make sure to continue blending out those hard edges!
Now let’s turn our attention to the cast shadow areas — where the object (in this case a rock) is casting a shadow on the surface where it sits. Take a minute or two to study the reference. Notice that the cast shadows are much darker and they have very sharp, defined edges.
A couple of special things to notice about cast shadows; shadows are not black! Often our eye reads them as black. Most of the time shadows are a dark purple/gray. If you remember this little tidbit of information, you’ll always get a much more realistic result! And pay attention to the depth of color in the cast shadow — the darkest area is always where the shadow touches the object.
With those 2 things in mind, let’s paint our cast shadow areas. You can add the color all at once, or build up a few layers using the glazing technique. Just remember to go slowly and don’t use too much water!
Add in any small details. I used a Gelly Roll pen to add the white lines in the large rock on the bottom. If you haven’t already painted a surface for your rocks to sit on, add that in now as well.
And voila! You’re finished.
