- Hi, I'm Jia Sung, I'm a painter and bookmaker.
We're in my studio here in New York,
and today we'll be going through
some basic watercolor techniques
as well as how I like to incorporate it in my work.
I really like watercolor for its immediacy.
There's something about how simple it is
that feels just really approachable.
Water's everything with watercolor, right?
It's kind of like the carrier
that unlocks everything about watercolor,
so we can kind of think
about the two techniques we're doing today
through this lens of water, right?
More water, less water, less control, more control.
So, a little bit more of a "wet on wet" approach, right?
Like using pigment that's being carried
through larger amounts and like swaths of water
to create something a little more fluid,
gestural, exploratory.
And then in using less water, the mark making
of watercolor begins to approach drawing a little more.
I'm going to start with these two paints.
They're a little wetter, right?
They're more liquid.
They come in the tubes and you can kind of squeeze them out.
I have here like a little,
I think it's called like a butcher tray, I believe.
And this is just nice
because you add so much water to watercolor.
It's nice to have a confined walled container,
so the water doesn't just run off the side.
With watercolor, you know,
because of course of the amount of water
that you're kind of saturating the paper with,
it's important.
Generally, you know, you wanna find a little bit
of a heavier weight paper.
There's a number of options.
I really like, I call it my old faithful,
it's just like, I think it's like a Canson paper.
So, it's like a really nice accessible option
and, you know, I just use it for everything.
I'm just kind of playing
with the shapes I can make on this paper.
When you're using a little more water,
the paint kind of follows the shape of the water.
As it dries down
it creates these nice little blossoming shapes, right?
They look like little flower edges
or like burn marks almost.
I mean I love the brevity of Georgia O'Keeffe's watercolors.
They feel so unpremeditated, very free.
She's kind of carving these big shapes around on the paper.
I think they're so interesting.
Just as an example of something you wouldn't really expect
from an artist whose most iconic work are so meticulous,
so sort of rigorous and so you really wouldn't expect
that she's also capable of this swooping exploratory mark.
There's really such a light touch.
I would say the building block unit
of watercolor is really like a wash.
If you think about watercolor as just the amount
of dilution you're adding to paint
and kind of spreading it out across the paper.
So, a wash could just be as simple as,
right, I'm adding a little water to this
like a little orangey color I've got
and, right, I'm dragging it out.
You can think about that as the foundational building block
from which you start to add more vocabulary.
So you're kind of playing
with this level of transparency over the white
of the paper to create the world of your artwork.
One neat thing you can do to kind of like flood
the large area on the paper at once
is to kind of wet down that area
and then start to introduce that paint.
And so, you can see the edges of those brushstrokes
get softened out, right?
And they start to dissolve just by themselves
in that pool of water that I've laid down previously.
Of course there's a limit to how much you can do that
especially on the paper.
The more you try to move that around sometimes,
the paper actually starts to peel up,
and in the worst case scenario,
the top layer of it just like rips off,
you have a little white hole in your painting.
Into this realm of watery paper,
you can really start to drop in pigment.
There's other colors that can go in.
It's also how you can start to build something
like a gradient.
But you can see as I dropped this lovely red in,
there's this beautiful fuzzy blossoming mark that comes out
that I think is so nice and it's so characteristic of,
especially the white and water approach with watercolor.
It feels very dreamlike.
I really enjoy this improvisational element of watercolor.
A piece I love that really does that well I think
is Romare Bearden's Brenda.
They're the large swaths
of very wet washes that he's dropping color into,
letting it spread out the way it naturally would.
And he carves back over that with charcoal of some kind.
But he's starting again
with this gestural abstract color field
that becomes the poem for the figure.
What I love about watercolor
is that there's so much here that's interesting
just in its own right that has nothing to do
with sort of having a trained hand or like,
you know, a really virtuosic grasp on the medium.
It's nice to see just what the paint wants to do by itself.
I think I'm gonna try switch it to pans.
I just really, I'm excited about these colors to be honest.
And the interesting thing about pan paints is that,
you know, you could really make your own, right,
from two paints.
If you just get, you know, the empty pans,
you can fill them up and let them dry with two paints.
You know, there's really not that much
is different about them.
The nice thing about the, sort of like,
hand palette format is that they're so portable, right?
Because they are essentially the same thing
as the two paints, but dried down.
As with all watercolor waters to activators,
so I'm really just gonna put some clean water
with a clean brush on the pans I'm planning to use.
And you know, don't worry if your pan paints
have some cracks in them
that's just really normal
and they'll smooth out as you kind of use them
and, you know, obviously drop some water on top.
So watercolor is so great for observational work
because of its portability.
And with just a little less water,
you can really capture the details of things
that you're looking at.
In college, I would often take my sketchbooks
and a little travel kit of paint
just to capture the things I was seeing around me,
you know, practice.
I love these hyacinths, this ranunculus, I believe it is.
I've seen like, you know,
a couple sort of like theme colors here.
It's really like, yellow, blue that shades
into violet of the flowers.
There's a wonderful Cezanne landscape watercolor
that's in the collection.
He uses lots of wonderful dry exploratory marks.
You can see that there's a little hints
throughout the piece where he kind of has a little bit
of pencil sketch marks, you know,
just to tell him where things are sitting.
Well, and even, you know, the first washes
that you lay down on the paper
is almost like note taking, right?
You're just leaving little notes, sort of like guide points.
So I'm just gonna go in and in that spirit, right,
make some notes about maybe where these ranunculus
are going with this violet color of the hyacinths.
I know that in mixing my colors
I don't really want that to touch the yellow
because they're complimentary colors
they start to cancel each other a little bit
like a little bit of a dirty brown.
The sort of fresh vibrancy
of these flowers is what's important to me
about what I'm looking at in front of me,
so I think I will lean
on maybe more of a predominant blue color just...
And I think the way this particular paper captures
again the details of all the little brush strokes,
it's actually kind of nice repeating these flowers, right?
I feel like it very gesturally imparts
that sense of the little petals kind of like, you know
unfurling and pointing in all the different directions.
So, I'm just gonna roll with that.
So I'm avoiding going full saturation
until I kind of finish taking my notes, right?
So, I'm leaving a little space for that leaf there.
Maybe I want a smaller brush.
I think I do.
I really like leaning into the texture
that you can make with brushes.
I recently did a series of tarot drawings.
I retold the tarot
from the Chinese mythological perspective.
I think that's really what a lot of my work is about.
This kind of like mythological, playful,
folklore sort of space.
So you'll see mostly square brushes actually
in my little collection here
'cause I actually really like the way
that the edge of the brush leaves little scratches
and random marks.
The rest of my brushes tend to be liner brushes.
So something finer, I like to come back in,
and after I make the initial sort of like larger sweeps
and add a little line work,
I sometimes do that with ballpoint pens as well.
You know, depends on what I'm working on.
I'm starting to sketch in these stems here.
Not at the full final saturation that I'm hoping for,
but just kind of using the same color family basically
to sketch in these shapes before I commit to them, right?
A little darker, a little more saturated.
Oh, and I love that little bud that's peeping around.
I tried to keep some of these smaller.
Not yet bloomed pieces of vegetation.
It's hard with plants, right?
Like, they're so detailed.
The way they overlap and interweave
I think is what is so beautiful and charming about them.
But I think you could really get sucked into,
you know, wanting to reproduce that faithfully.
So, I try to go for, maybe almost more gesture of that.
I'm translating that lovely purple through this ultramarine.
So I'm just gonna go in with that
and start pulling out a few of these flowers.
I love seeing this drier brushier technique.
I think that Cezanne piece is so interesting.
He's pulling out little details, right?
Like little trees and yet the whole thing stays quite loose,
you know, I think there's a really lovely lyrical,
it almost begins to look like music notation
to me at some points.
I'm hoping to channel a little of that
in how I am dealing with these hyacinths.
I wanna bring a little detail in there,
but I don't wanna get too precious.
So I think there is something a little slower about,
something observational like this, perhaps,
because I'm sort of building up a little more carefully,
you know, around these shapes.
There's something about the still life.
You know, I think artists just keep coming back to it
because it is relaxing.
It's like going to a spa for your art brain.
It's like, "No questions today, no thoughts.
I'm just painting flowers.
Please don't ask me anything."
I mean even, you know, the gradients of this plant
are helping me inform the decisions I make to paint.
I can see that on this leaf for example, right?
It's a little yellower near the stem.
It's almost, it's most dark
and saturated green right near the tip.
I was actually just thinking about how like such a big tell
of this dryer approach is the way the marks interact.
Sort of like an optical mixing, right,
of like one veil of color over another.
The edges are much crisper.
I think in that way it can be a little less forgiving
than this bubbly or wetter approach where everything
is just like an interesting texture.
Talking about negative space, right?
Maybe I'll try to carve around some of these hyacinths
that I've painted previously.
I am a fan of the white of paper.
To me, it especially recalls traditions
of Chinese ink painting for example,
where the white of paper is such a space
for like breathing room.
I'm gonna knock in this face
just because it's such a big shape
to me in this still life setup
and I think it will really help anchor our whole composition
on the page.
Yeah, I think it's a great place for some wet on wet.
Just happens to mimic that texture really nicely.
The water's kind of pulling
at the bottom of the page a little, but that's okay,
I like that.
I might even like exaggerate some of this texture
'cause it kind of looks like that vase to me.
I think now these big yellow baubles
of the ranunculus are drier.
I wanna go back in and just add a little bit
of visual interest by describing
maybe some of that shift in value.
So I'm gonna get a smaller brush.
Right, so a related color to this sort of pure yellow,
but just a little darker.
And because this previous really aggressive blob
of yellow I placed on here is now dry,
I get to have a little more control
in the way I place these marks down, right?
You can see it's a little cleaner.
It's more drawing like.
I'm kind of thinking about the way
that O'Keeffe brings some smaller,
finer marks into the piece almost to improve its legibility.
You can think about the different sizes
of marks in a piece as well
as like a source of interesting visual tension.
For example, the train is distilled down
to this very geometric souping triangle,
looks like in a slightly drier watercolor,
almost like a drawing mark again.
I love the Marlene Dumas portraits forever
and she's really doing something quite similar there.
These larger sort of areas of wash
that she then goes back into
and creates some detail intention again,
bring those human features
into these otherwise quite ambiguous blobs.
Maybe I'll do a little bit
of the same thing to the hyacinths actually.
'Cause now I see this,
I feel like that's missing a little bit of that.
You know, I want a little bit of a unifying hand almost.
Again, not super worried about detail.
Almost like unfocusing my eyes, right?
And just kind of going for a general sense
of what's in front of me.
And in some cases actually just reinforcing
going over what's already there, right?
Like that first wash that I did to block out
where I envisioned the shapes going,
was also very, very light 'cause it was tentative, right?
I wanted the option to kind of like maybe correct
or you know, choose what to emphasize later.
Now that it's a little more clear to me what's happening
on the page, it's easier for me to make that call.
If I'm looking at what's in front of me,
I guess we have to table...
It could be interesting, you know, we could try it.
Perhaps even just as a big geometric shape
could be an interesting element
that helps us feel a little more resolved
and like, considered.
I think a pretty thin wash of it would be nice.
I like that.
It's also the only like, really reddish thing
that's in this composition, which I don't know about you,
but I feel like I was missing that a little bit, right?
We have a lot of blue and yellow predominating.
I'm not so much interested in recreating the exact color
of the wood as just like, you know,
again, what it does like saturation wise, right,
for this composition.
And you know, I normally love these little puddles, right?
And the way the watercolor pools, but in that case,
you know, I thought it was perhaps a little distracting
so it just evened it out with the brush, right?
Yeah, I like that.
I feel like that helps a lot actually.
I would, you know, maybe start to keep bringing in areas
of more shadow, more saturation, right?
Building up in these thin, drier layers.
Some areas of more detail and smaller shapes throughout.
But I'm pretty happy with this.
I think that all the sort of larger elements
that I need are kind of in place
and it's really just about finessing and futzing around
with it a little bit.
There are so many ways that artists have kind
of used the medium of watercolor,
so I really encourage you to go out and play as well
with the amount of options that are open to you.
Paper, brushes, a type of paint can all really inform
what the final product is.
I think that's the beauty of watercolor.
It's such an open medium.
It's really just about giving yourself that space to play.