The Artist's Road Watercoler Test

Calm II 40 x 53” John Hulsey

One of the truly confounding characteristics of watercolors is their tendency to change value and intensity when dry versus when wet. Knowing how the colors will change when dry is essential to painting with watercolor for one simple reason: the medium demands speed in execution to reach its full expressive potential. Working fast, wet into wet, is flirting with disaster, moment to moment, stroke by stroke. Working wet on dry and “chasing the bead” down the sheet, also leaves little time for second-guessing a color mix for intensity or value. If this is not maddening enough, the same colors can look and even behave quite differently on different types of watercolor paper. Change paint manufacturers and you further change the way some reliable colors behave. So many variables—so little time! This is probably why artists often claim that watercolor is hard to learn, and why there seem to be fewer professional watercolorist…