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Many people are under the impression that once a mark has been made on watercolour paper it is there for all eternity and thus changes cannot be made, mistakes cannot be rectified. That’s not true. There are ways of softening and lifting to make changes or even move paint away altogether.

Whilst these methods can be used for damage limitation they can more effectively be thought of as techniques in their own right and therefore a valuable part of your tool-box. The first thing to understand is that some pigments stain the paper more than others. Study the key on the manufacturer’s colour chart; stainers are usually indicated with “St” and these are often the synthetic colours. Earth colours (yellow ochre, raw sienna etc.) tend to be fairly easy to lift away.

So how to go about making these lifts and changes?You can set about testing the colours you have at hand. Draw a series of squares, one for each colour and large enough to give you room to manoeuvre, say 5cms. ( 2”) square. Fill each shape with a fairly intense wash and name it according to colour for future reference. Leave everything to dry for say 15 minutes. Now take a clean, damp brush and work away at one edge of each square in turn, blotting as you go. Next, lay a band of clean water across each square, wait for a few seconds and then blot . See what happens? Some pigments will have shifted and others not. Using these methods you can soften the marks you have made and in some cases remove the paint almost entirely, so long as it is not one of the staining pigments. You can also work an area of paint with a soft sea sponge. Another technique is to take a craft knife or a piece of fine emery paper and gently abrade the surface of the paper. This can create highlights to form sparkle and if you are really neat you can actually lift out a sliver of paper to leave a clean white line. Then of course you can go through a similar set of experiments with wet paint. Try lifting with a damp sponge, tissue, a squeezed out brush or good quality blotting paper. Record what you have done for future reference because it follows that you may now wish to choose the colours you paint with according to how you would like them to perform.

Copying the exact colours and tones of nature is a difficult thing and probably undesirable as the idea of making a painting is to bring something new into the world , to interpret what we see, not try to remake it. Accepting the limitations of pigment on paper and turning their qualities to advantage is where true painting begins and is in itself a very liberating experience. The transparency of watercolour paint is one of its many virtues and the skill comes in learning to balance light with dark, colour with tone all at the same time as holding the composition in harmony. Keeping to a limited palette of say one red, one yellow and one blue will bring colour harmony as all the secondary and tertiary colours will be made from the that range and so are , by definition, related to one another. Even so the possibilities are limitless, you can try placing subtle, mixed colours next to the pure primaries from which you have made them working with only subdued,subtle colour using only assertive e.g.. primary colours. Whichever option you go for, remember that varying the tonal values of your colour can have a massive impact . A picture consisting of only subdued colours in dilute washes may well look insipid, but by placing dark next to light you can create something far more dynamic
Contrasting complimentary colours and tones can bring attention to a specific part of a picture. Consider also the amount of space you allocate to strong areas….for instance placing too much of a strong colour close to a skyline may distort the perspective by appearing to jump forward, whereas a sliver of dilute wash in the same colour may create an illusion of vast distance.