How do you overcome white paper syndrome?
I got this question quite a bit because a perfectly clean white paper can be intimidating.
It’s filled with all sorts of possibilities of a successful painting, or a failed one.
Today let’s talk about some practical ways to decrease your fear of white paper.
Hello, this is Eric from Café Watercolor.
I hope you are doing well.
First of all, let me make this clear, there is no way to completely get rid of the fear
of a new painting because we don’t know the future.
What you fear is not the white paper itself, it’s the uncertainty.
“Will this be a successful painting?”
“What if I messed it up?”
“I don’t want to waste this nice piece of paper…” and so on
Because of the unpredictable nature of watercolor, we will always have to deal with that uncertainty.
Unlike many other mediums, you cannot simply erase, cover, or press ctrl-z to fix your
mistake.
However, there are ways to decrease your white paper syndrome.
I’m not going to just say “just do it, what’s the worst that can happen?
A piece of paper?
You can just start a new one!”
I understand nobody wants to experience the frustration of failure and wasting time.
So I am here to help you and give you some practice advice for you to start implementing
in your work.
And again, in the end, I will do a bonus demo to practice what we learned.
Ok, here it goes.
Number one, practice on cheap paper.
When you use expensive paper, you have more pressure to do a good painting because you
don’t want it to go to waste.
And the more pressure you have, the more fear you have.
When I first start learning watercolor, I just practice on cheap paper.
This helps me to get used to the nature of watercolor.
I start moving on to more expensive paper when I am pretty familiar with watercolor.
While better papers can give you a better time painting.
Cheap papers are good to test things out.
Your mindset will also shift from doing a finished painting to a practice.
That’s a lot of pressure off you.
Number two is planning.
Plan ahead what you’re going to do, and prepare your mixtures first.
This is very helpful especially if you are just starting!
If you read any good recipe.
What’s the first thing you see?
The type of ingredients and the amounts you need to make the dish.
No recipe is going to ask you to turn on the stove and heat up the pan before telling you
what ingredients to prep for.
Because you can’t prepare the ingredients on the side while you are cooking at the same
time, they should be ready to go.
Same thing as painting and start your first wash.
Because you want to have a nice clean wash and you might be struggling against the drying
time.
Pre-mid the colors you need for the wash can be very helpful.
After you are really confidence with watercolor and mixing color, then you can wing it if
you want.
The third is to keep it simple.
We all have seen some watercolor master painting demos.
Some of them have so much experience with watercolor, they were able to do a lot in
the first wash, leaving out highlights, a bunch of wet on wet works and stuff.
However, if you are just getting started, keep it simple.
There’s nothing wrong to just have a simple gradient for your first wash.
If you want more soft shapes, wait till your first wash is dry, re-wet it and paint wet
on wet again.
Give yourself enough time for each wash by doing things one at a time.
By doing simple things step by step, you avoid getting overwhelmed.
Keeping it simple also means a simple subject.
Don’t pick a forest with light and shadow all over the place or a rocky beach.
Pick something nice and simple like one of the minimalist paintings I did.
Sometimes a simple subject can be powerful and effective!
Number four is to keep your first wash light.
A very light and transparent wash eases you into the painting.
If you try to go very heavy for the first wash, you are committing too soon and you
are not giving yourself enough room to move into the painting slowly.
A light, the transparent wash will fade to almost nothing when it’s dry.
But by getting rid of the white on the paper, you will be more ready to make more marks
and start painting more.
Ok enough talk, let’s do an actual painting.
But before we start please remember to like and subscribe, also let me know down below
if you have the white paper syndrome, and if you have any other tips that can help you
to overcome.
So we are going to do a painting from this.
Don’t freak out, it’s going to be easier than you think.
Let’s jump into it.
So for the first wash I am going to pre-mix the color that I'm going to use.
So it's just the sky.
So if you look at a photo, you see the sky turn from blue to sort of a yellowish color
to some orange and pink in the bottom.
So that's what I'm going to use.
So you can see I mix three piles of paint.
One is blue, one is sort of warm yellow, and another one is a little bit pinkish-orange
color.
So I start my wash from the top, which is using the blue, and when it's time to transition,
I'm going to start just adding the yellow color without washing my brush.
And then the pink color.
Now the orangy-pink color is not intense enough, so I mix a little bit more.
But I already have a good base for it, so it saved me a lot of time.
So I don't need to mix them on the fly and try to figure them out.
And the bottom, just finishing up with some random colors because they are going to be
covered by the mountain and the tree so it doesn't really matter.
And that is it.
That is a first wash.
It's very simple and easy.
As long as your paper is tilted and you have enough water in your mixture, you'll be good.
So I'm pre-mixing the color I'm going to use for the second wash, which is the color of
the cloud.
Now, the color of the cloud in like the sunset or dawn time is actually pretty dark because
there's not a lot of sunlight that's hitting the cloud.
So I am rewetting the surface with clean water, just the sky portion.
And I wait a little bit for the water to come down to the bottom and I start to paint the
cloud.
I'm using the paint that I already mixed, and I use the tip of my brush and then just
very lightly let the brush glide on the paper and do wet on wet paint to it.
So you can see, because I rewet the surface, anything I put in will be very soft.
But because my mixture is a little bit dry and I'm using just the tip of my brush, the
shape is still somewhat controlled.
So this is perfect for some soft cloud like this.
And now I add some orange to the bottom of the cloud, which is where the sun is hitting,
and then a little bit thinner cloud that just have that orange color, adding some darker
mixture to give it more volume.
And again, it's still wet, so anything I put in, they will spread out very softly.
And that is what I intended to do.
Now., I could have done that in the first wash, but it's perfectly fine if you are just
starting to learn water color, wait for it to dry, rewet it, and do what you want to
do, wet onto wet.
Again, as long as you do every step very cleanly, your painting will still look fresh.
Get some more cloud in there.
There's plenty of wetness.
And because I paint tilted and I didn't rotate my paper at all, you start to see some tiny
little paint streak down.
But since this is just a practice it doesn't really bother me.
I'm adding a little bit more dark in some areas and I think it's time to continue the
wash down.
So I'm just using a big scroll brush and finish dab water.
And as I continue down, I'm starting to paint a distant mountain, wet onto wet.
So I paint a cool gray color into it.
Since it's wet onto wet, it's going to soften up, so it feels like the mountains in the
fog in the far distance, which is what I intended to.
And the rest of it I am just going to paint over.
So after this wash is dry, we can start to paint another layer on top and you will have
enough time to plan your next step.
So this is why I say this is actually pretty simple if you have enough planning and if
you know what to do.
So this is one I'm going to do once in a while.
I'm going to do some simpler demos like these.
Because there's already a lot of advanced demo out there, and even if you go to like
a master watercolor workshop, you're going to see them painting some painting that might
feel a little bit more advanced.
So if you are a beginner, there's very limited information and very limited thing you can
learn from those advanced demo.
So this is why I'm sharing this very simple painting, because I want to help to fill the
gap, so if you're just getting started, you can learn something from this and eventually
move on to a more advanced demo and technique.
So again, the bottom wash is dry, so I paint another layer on top.
And this time I do want some hard edges so I need to wait after it's dry.
I'm just adding a little bit more darker colors on the mountains on the right, just to separate
them a little bit.
I think after the video I actually glaze it over just to make it a little bit more clear.
So another layer done.
I rotate the paper so the pain doesn't gather all in the bottom.
And again, after this layer is done, see I'm blowing it dry right now?
After it's done, after it's dry, I have another layer to work on, which is the front tree.
The tree that's very dark, just the silhouette, but you have to make sure this is completely
dry, because the tree is a very clear silhouette.
It's all hard edges, so I don't need to paint wet onto wet, so I need to make sure the layer
is dry.
So here I have some evergreen trees in the foreground.
Again, my last video is painting trees, so I'm not going to talk too much about how to
paint a tree.
You can refer back to my last video.
But the most important thing here is just to get the value right.
It's really dark, so make sure you have a dark mixture.
And then, varying your brushstroke.
I can't emphasize that enough.
I said that almost every single video I do.
Varying your brushstroke a little bit, especially you're painting something like evergreen tree.
Even though you do see a lot of repetitive pattern, try to vary in the way you describe
those pattern.
If you make a lot of repetitive marks, your painting is going to look boring very quickly
because they are already very similar shape.
So if you try to go through every similar shape with the same visual language and same
brushstroke it's going to look boring.
But again, this is just a very simple painting, and if you're doing this for the first time,
I suggest you just focusing on making different washes, make sure each wash is nice and clean.
Work on one aspect of your painting at a time.
Here is the finished painting.
I hope you enjoyed this demo.
I hope this video is helpful to you.
If you try one of the tips and it works for you, be sure to let me know in the comments
below, I would love to hear from you.
As always, please like and subscribe if this video is helpful for you.
I will be making more practice tips videos in the future if you like this type of content.
Remember to go to my website and download my fast track watercolor guide ebook if you
haven’t.
I’m Eric from Café Watercolor, have a wonderful day and I’ll see you next time.