How to smooth out blotchy effects in watercolour

Hi it’s Anna Mason, and in this watercolour tip video I wanted to show you how I painted
this realistic and pretty Song Thrush egg. I used only 3 colours for this. I was using
Winsor and Newton ones but they can also be substituted for Daniel Smith ones. They are: - Cobalt
Turquoise Light (Cobalt Teal Blue in Daniel Smith), Payne’s Grey (which is helpfully also Payne’s Grey in
Daniel Smith) and Burnt Sienna (Quinacridone Burnt Orange if you're using Daniel Smith).
I mostly used the Cobalt Turquoise Light and Burnt Sienna for painting the eggshell colour and it captured that colour really
well. But it did pose it’s own challenges as the two paints did NOT play nicely together.
So here I’ll show you how I dealt with that to get a great end result….
It started off fine as I applied my first watery layer to try to match to the lightest
tones in the painting - found at the edges and in the central highlight.
And it was ok as I painted a second watery layer on top to mark out and isolate the highlights so
I didn’t paint over them later.
But next, when I went in and applied the darkest tones in the eggshell colour - and was therefore using the
paint much thicker. I started to notice that the colours were
separating out in the palette.It was even more noticeable as I added a touch more water to
work on my midtones.
And as I applied it to the paper the separation began to happen there too within the texture
of the paper, so that I was getting a blotchy sort of effect to my paint when I was
aiming for something much smoother.The same effect was noticeable as I watered down
to work on the lighter midtones. The separation was leading to the overlaps in my paint layers
being much more noticeable.
So that even when it had dried, the transitions between the darkest tones and midtones were
not nice and smooth and graduated.
Luckily egg shells do have SOME texture too them, so a perfectly smooth finish wasn’t required
but I did need to smooth it some more so I made a real effort to do that by focusing
my next layers on the transitions between tonal areas, trying to make them smooth by
gently scrubbing at them.
As the paint dried off I could see that, where my layers had been just a little too wet,
I was still experiencing the paint splitting on the paper leaving a blotchy, messy effect.
I wasn’t going to be defeated though. So key to fixing this was to make sure that the
paper was totally dry and then to use minimum paint on my brush to work carefully onto ONLY
those areas that needed to be darker - to smooth and even out the colour that way. Having
less paint on the brush kept the paper drier which discouraged the paint separation.
After doing the same very carefully with some more watery paint through the midtones, I could
see that the darkest tones at the bottom needed darkening some more so I had to go back in
with another layer of the thick paint - again making sure that the layer underneath was
totally dry, and being careful not to have too much paint on my brush at once.
And once that was dry I again had to do a check and fill in any gaps being careful not
to add the layer of paint to the area around the gap. Finally when I was happy that the result looked
smooth enough
I let it totally dry off again before applying the dark spots to the egg which really helped
to give it it’s from and even distract the eye from any imperfections underneath.
And finally used my tiny brush to again darken up any patches of the blue colour that needed
darkening to smooth it out overall.
A full video class of this egg is available now in my online School.
If you’ve enjoyed this tip video, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and I’d
love it if you’d share this video with your friends.
And if you’d like to take one of my tried and tested video classes FOR FREE, come on
over to
AnnaMasonArt.com where you’ll find even more resources to help you pick up your brush
and paint the way you’ve always wanted to.Remember, you won’t improve your painting unless you
MAKE the time to paint. So be sure to schedule in some me-time this week and paint something
YOU love.
Thanks so much for watching and I’ll see you soon with another tip for creating watercolours with "wow".

How to smooth out blotchy effects in watercolour

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