No worries! It’s fun getting questions XD
First off I gotta say that I’ve had no art education so all this is just from personal experience and it’s not the correct way or anything;;
I think one of the most important things when you’re using watercolors is to be patient! If you’re painting two areas that are next to each other (e.g. hair and face) make sure the first area of color is completely dry before you start the 2nd area, otherwise your colors will bleed into each other and will get muddled up for sure! Though, this could be a nice effect when you want it. For example:
wet on wet: this is what happened when blue was painted into orange while it was still wet. So you can see the two colors mixed and created greenish shades in between, which could be nice.
wet on dry: if the first layer of paint was dried properly, you should get nice crisp lines when painting second color on top. Otherwise it will look like the “wet on not quite dry” bit.. where I was too impatient to wait for yellow to dry, and you can see that the black is slightly bleeding into the yellow. DAMN. >:(
This is the basic techniques I use to shade with watercolours! If you make mistakes, just quickly dab with tissue while the paint is wet, wait for the paper to dry and then try again :)
When choosing shades: sometimes you can create different shades just by controlling the amount of water.
So in the pic above, the black square shows the hue color as out of the tube. To the right is what happens when you mix more & more water into it, and to the left is what happens by mixing grey into it. Even though the original color looks quite brown, when you mix in enough water, the last few shades is actually quite good for skin. Sometimes you can shade just by layering the same color on top of each other.
This one shows shades between cadmium red deep hue to yellow ochre. Somewhere in between might be a nice color for cheeks, or darker skin shade for example.
When you get the hang of mixing colors, you can play with more interesting color combinations!
Hope this answers your questions? @_@ Let me know if I’m unclear!
