Make Your Watercolours POP (5 Contrast Tips you can use today)
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Do you ever find yourself in the middle of a watercolour painting that feels a little bit meh?
You have a subject you like and it's nice enough, but now something feels like it's missing. Let's figure out exactly what that is and I’ll share 5 tips and techniques you can use today to make your watercolours pop.
The Problem: When Everything Feels "A Bit Nothing"
If you do have the feeling that your painting is a little bit nothing, what it usually means is that all the values that you're using are a bit close in range. When I say value, I'm talking about how light or dark your colours are. When we look at an image where everything is kind of the same, the eye doesn't really know where to go, where to start looking, or where to look next—it gets a little bit bored.
The thing we need is contrast.
What we're looking for is something different because that's what draws the eye.
Creating Contrast: More Than Just Value
Now we can actually create contrast in many different ways. I think value is the most important, but there are other things that you can use to create contrast:
Color Temperature Contrast: You can have nice warm reds and oranges contrasting with some cooler blues in the painting, and where those are the most different, that's what's going to draw your eye.
Saturation Contrast: This is the degree of vibrancy of your colors. You could have a range of bright, neon, vibrant colors contrasting against some neutral, muted-down grays.
Texture Contrast: You could have flat, smooth areas of the painting and contrast those with some that have a bit of interesting texture to them.
Edge Contrast: Sometimes we have a nice clean, neat hard edge and sometimes we have soft edges that kind of drift so that you can't tell the boundary of one object and another very clearly.
Whichever one of those that you choose, if you can create a high contrast, it's going to draw the eye and that will create a natural focal point.
And you do want that—you want a nice focal point in your painting. The idea is to direct the viewers eye by using something like contrast. That way, you're guiding the viewers eye and drawing it into the painting. That's what makes a painting or an image feel a little bit more exciting and interesting.
You know, we do like a bit of drama!
Seeing Contrast in Action
In the video above you can see the lemons that I've painted. There's a little bit of variation in tone in those yellows that I've used to create the lemons, but notice what happens when we add a little bit of contrast. It is so fun to drop in that dark paint and watch it create the instant contrast with your paler lemon.
Now if you're thinking "gosh, that looks very extreme," fear not! Remember we haven't finished the whole painting yet, so we haven't got any other values around those lemons. Values are something that we judge relative to what is around each particular tone. So if you've dropped in your dramatic color and you think you've gone a little bit overboard, don't panic—finish it off and you might find it was just right.
Is all this lemony goodness inspiring you to get out your brush?
Lemons… and in fact any fruits hanging in the sunlight on a tree make such a wonderful subject that I just had to create a whole series with them in the Happy Painters Hub.
Would you like to join in?
Understanding Light and Shadow
The other thing to bear in mind is that if you're wanting to represent a really bright sunny day (which is kind of the idea if I'm painting these happy sunny lemons in a tree), then you really want to convey that idea of sunshine. We can't really paint sunshine, but we can paint the shadows that it creates.
When the light is very bright, you get a very intense dark shadow. When it's a little more cloudy and there's only enough light to cast a slight shadow, you'll find it's very subtle. The relationships between these colour values is something that's kind of coded into our brains—it's sort of hardwired. You don't need to know that information consciously; when your brain sees an image like that, it will automatically know "oh, it's a very sunny day" or "there's not much sunshine at all" if the shadows are subtle.
But as a painter, armed with this little bit of information, you know exactly how to convey those gloriously happy, sunshiny days that we all love so much.
The Watercolour Advantage
Now in watercolour, adding this contrast has yet another advantage because we don't actually have white paint—we have to preserve our light edges. When I was painting these lemons, I left one of the edges (the one where the light is brightest) almost white, almost clean paper. So that's giving us a bit of a lost edge there, but what I'm really trying to show is the highlight on that lemon.
It's really not obvious if you've got the highlighted edge of the lemon against the blank white paper because again, no contrast. So when we pop in our dark green of the leaf, there suddenly what we're able to do is paint the edge of the lemon. We've managed to trap in that highlight and really show the edge of that lemon rather nicely.
I have to admit, it is really fun to do this! I love trapping in those light edges and having the shape of the lemon suddenly pop out.
A Word of Caution
But if you do it absolutely everywhere, you've gone and given yourself almost the same problem on the other side of the spectrum, because remember we said what we need is a little bit of a point of difference.
But if we have extreme contrast all over, it just becomes like a bit of a pattern and your eye doesn't quite know where to land. So use your power of contrast wisely!
My Top Tips for Better Contrast
Let me leave you with a couple of tips.
If you're like me and you paint for fun, you might just be the impulsive painter that I am. As much as I'm all for jumping in and enjoying splashing that paint around and working things out as you go along, it is helpful to have a little bit of a plan before you start.
Plan Your Light Source: The main thing you probably want to plan is where your light source is coming from. Once you work that out, you'll know where you want to keep those light edges and where you might want to choose to pop in your really dark contrasts.
Try Thumbnail Sketches: Sometimes it's helpful to start off with a little sketch. You can do a little thumbnail sketch to plan out where your light edges are going to be. You can even do what they call a "notan sketch," which is a little sketch using only two colors—a pure black and a white—to make sure that you're clear about where your dark shapes are going to be and where your light shapes are going to be. It's quite a fun exercise!
Don't Be Afraid to Go Bold: When you pop in those darks, make sure you use lots of lovely juicy color. Don't be afraid to drop that dark in because it'll really make the light sing. Remember, watercolour always dries a little bit lighter, so even if you think it's gone in a little bit too dark, you might find that it's going to dry to just the right shade for you.
Remember Values Are Relative: Don't judge your dark as too dark if what you're comparing it to is blank unpainted paper surrounding it. Wait until you finish the painting and you might find that your darks were just right, even though you thought they were a little bit too dark.
Be Strategic: Remember to be strategic with using your contrast. Don't use it everywhere—use it to kind of direct the eye and help you create a focal point.
Final Thoughts
Don't forget, value is only one way of adding contrast. We talked about a whole range of others, and one of them was texture. Texture can be really easy to add with a few carefully selected paints—they're so much fun to use and I use them in almost every painting.
If you are wondering what my personal favourites of these granulating watercolour pigments are, you will be pleased to hear that I have a whole blog post all about them.
Click here to discover the 3 paint colours I just can stop using.
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