The World of Watercolor

 

Watercolor, let’s start from the beginning!

 

As you know, watercolor is a popular painting method that is created when paints are mixed with a water-based solution. The colors are made to appear bolder or lighter based on the amount of water that the pigment is combined with. What’s unique about this style of art is that watercolor refers to both the medium and the finished artwork.

 

Like any other painting technique, watercolors come in a variety of styles. The transparency of the colors allows for a clean and luminescent appearance within its paintings. This translucent effect is what makes watercolors such a desirable medium and separates from other artforms. Artists can paint over color after color to create their desired look. This is possible due to the opaqueness of the watercolors.

 

The beginnings of watercolor date back to the stone age with cave paintings. People mixed pigments to produce a paint-like substance and created visual scenes of animals and other creatures they came across. However, it wasn’t until the middle ages that watercolor began to gain prominence. Artists painted small scenes and decorative symbols in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. The vivid colors of these pigments beside the elaborate texts caused the artform to rise to popularity. Years later, during the Renaissance, watercolor became a more prominent and familiar style of painting. This era produced some of the most well-known watercolor artists of its time and still today, such as Albrecht Düre.

 

Despite its popularity, watercolor still wasn’t viewed as renowned as other mediums such as oil paintings and printmaking, which were two of the most distinguished forms of the time. However, this all changed in the 1800s. With a heightened excitement and interest in the world and wildlife exploration, watercolor paintings soon became a favorite among artists when depicting nature. Scientific publications and field guides used these paintings to represent various creatures and plant life. One of the most notable watercolor artists of this time is ornithologist John James Audubon, whose name you might recognize from the Audubon Nature Institute and Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. Audubon studied American birds and used his love for art to depict them in their natural habitat through elaborate illustrations. These depictions helped him create a complete pictorial record of every North American species of bird.

 

These beautiful portrayals of the natural world are what put watercolor paintings on the map. The fluidity and luminescence of the colors make this artform truly unique. It allowed artists to capture scenes of nature as well as travel and even portraits with a soft and ethereal quality.

Although it has an elaborate history, watercolor painting is an easily accessible art form that anyone can try. If you’re looking to dive into the world of art but aren’t sure where to start, give watercolors a go. All you need are the watercolors themselves, a paintbrush and of course, water! We suggest starting off painting on a watercolor pad and working up to larger canvases once you’ve mastered the technique.