Learning Something New About Color

You Can Get the Color Intensity You Want

The versatility in watercolors, especially for painting in landscapes, is too great to be ignored, but sometimes it can leave us wanting more color intensity than transparent pigments provide. But don’t you just love when I complain about something and offer a solution in the same breath? It’s a gift.

Enter Eleanor Lowden with a bold approach to watercolors. She goes for opaque colors to create a fall landscape that rivals the saturation of any oil or acrylic painting, but with all the advantages of watercolors.

Here she shares three tips for seeking intense colors in watercolor that give her Courageous Color video its name. Learning painters will find a lot to soak up with these painting ways! Enjoy!

Start with No Color At All

Whatever you are painting, take a black and white photograph of it for starters. Use that as a reference so you won’t feel obligated or distracted by the colors in the scene. Instead, you get to build a painting full of the colors you want to see.

Pull Tube Color

It can feel both dangerous and basic to start with color straight from the tube. Soooo much color. Too much color? Never. You’ve got to start with color to get great color.

For your first passes, mix colors in a very minimal way and use little water. Layering and blending come later. For now it is all about courageous color and courageous colors don’t hide 

Keep to Your Surface

Color mixing and adding depth to your painting can all take place on your actual surface. It is the same with layering and blending.

Keep to the surface of your painting as you soften edges and merge colors to pull your painting together in a harmonized, beautiful fall scene.  Don’t turn away and try to plan on the palette. Instead, work directly and loosely. 

More From Eleanor

You can preview Eleanor’s painting techniques here and discover how she goes “no frame” with her watercolors and gives her paintings a backing that stands up to all the color she lets flourish! Enjoy a Courageous Color adventure with her!