by Wendon Blake
7.
Drybrush, Scumbling, and Opaque Painting
Up to this point, I’ve focused on all the ways in which the new medium of acrylic can match traditional watercolor—and often beat the older medium at its own game. However, I hope I’ve also made clear that acrylic adds a whole new range of possibilities to the vocabulary of watercolor painting. If you’ve tried all the little tests that I’ve recommended in preceding chapters, you know that the various acrylic mediums give you unprecedented control over the consistency of your paint. You’ve also gotten a taste of the remarkable ability of acrylic paint to give you complete transparency, complete opacity, and lots of stages in between, ranging from the most delicate semi-transparent haze to the thickest semi-opaque fog.
Once you get going with acrylics, you’ll find it hard to resist the temptation to exploit the full range of these possibilities. Watercolorists who switch to acrylic are likely to begin by trying all the traditional transparent techniques which they’ve mastered in the older medium. After a while, however, they begin to explore all the things that acrylic can do—and that traditional watercolor can’t do. Thus, many acrylic watercolorists evolve a kind of mixed technique, combining luminous transparent color with more opaque passages.
They find, for example, that acrylic greatly extends the range of drybrush effects that are possible in traditional watercolor. Among other things, they find that they can drybrush light paint over dark, something which is unthinkable in the older medium. They also discover the fascination of scumbling and broken color, both of which are methods of semi-opaque painting which add weight and richness if they’re not overdone. And finally they discover that opaque color may not demolish a painting after all, but might just enhance it. They’re astonished to find that no lightning bolt falls from heaven when they paint their first opaque picture.
Drybrush Washes and Strokes
In traditional watercolor painting, the technique of drybrush is fairly simple. You pick up some fairly liquid color on your brush, then flick out most of the color or wipe the brush on a paper towel, so that just a hint of color remains on the brush. The brush can be just damp or it can actually contain a fair amount of color, but it’s not really sopping wet. Thus, you can’t really lay a solid wash of color.
You then apply the color to the painting surface by just grazing the paper, rather than by bearing down on the painting surface to cover the paper evenly. You know, of course, that the texture of the paper is uneven; that is, there are lots of little peaks and valleys, which can be very pronounced in the paper designated as “rough” and less pronounced in the paper designated as “cold pressed.” As the brush glides over the surface of the paper, color is deposited only on the peaks; there isn’t enough liquid color to settle down into the valleys. The harder you press, the more paint you deposit on the peaks and you may force a bit of color into the valleys. But, as I said, you don’t really get a solid layer of color.
How you hold the brush is important. If you hold the side of the brush parallel to the surface of the paper, you won’t force the color into the valleys; you’ll touch only the highest points of the peaks, and that’s where the paint will stay. In other words, this is the way to put down the lightest veil of color. On the other hand, if you hold the brush vertically—more or less at a right angle to the painting surface—and force the tip of the brush downwards so that the hairs dig into the paper, you obviously shove more color into the valleys, as well as leaving color on the peaks.
Here are some experiments to try as a means of finding out how your drybrush effects are influenced by the way you hold the brush, by the amount of paint you pick up, and by the consistency of the paint.
(1) Mix a wash of liquid acrylic color, using only tube color and water. Dip your largest flat brush into the wash and lightly shake out some of the liquid color. Hold the brush more or less parallel to the painting surface and press your thumb down against the hairs of the brush as you move across the paper. What you’ll get is a kind of “drybrush” wash, which won’t give you a solid wash of color, but a layer of semi-liquid color that’s broken here and there by lots of little flecks of bare white paper. Such a wash has a rough, vibrant effect, something you may find especially effective for painting the wall of an old building, a rocky cliff, or a country road.
(2) Now take the same brush, dip it into the liquid color once again, and wipe the brush on a paper towel, which will absorb most of the color, but not all of it. Hold the brush at a right angle to the painting surface—straight up, that is—and skim the paper with the tip of the brush. See how little color you can deposit.
This is what might be called a drybrush wash. A large, flat brush—round ones don’t work so well for this kind of thing—is dipped in liquid color, thinned only with water, and then lightly shaken to get rid of any excess fluid that might drip off the brush. You can then hold the brush roughly parallel to the painting surface with one hand, and pull the brush across the surface as you press the flat of the brush against the paper with the fingers of the other hand. The color doesn’t quite cover, doesn’t quite sink into all the valleys of the paper, but leaves little flecks of light. This irregular type of wash is ideal for painting the glint of sunlight on water or certain kinds of cloud formations.
If you hold a large, flat brush at right angles to the painting surface—with the brush straight up, that is—and sweep it quickly across the paper with just the very tips of the bristles touching the surface, you get this kind of streaky dry brush wash. The brush should be just damp, not wet. Note that the brush was wetter when it made the strokes at the top of this sample than those at the bottom.
Holding your brush straight up, at a right angle to the painting surface, press down hard so that the bristles are flat against the paper. The brush forms an L, with the handle vertical and the hairs horizontal. If the brush is damp with color, not sopping wet, you’ll produce this kind of drybrush effect. The brush was wetter at the top of this sample than at the bottom.
Drybrush strokes can be thick and dark, light and delicate, revealing more paper or less. Try strokes with all your brushes, the large ones and the small ones, the flat ones and the round ones. Try strokes with a fair amount of color on the brush and strokes with very little color on the brush.
(3) Pick up some more liquid color on the same brush, get rid of most of it, hold the brush straight up once again, and jam it down hard against the paper as you make your stroke. I don’t mean you should wreck your brush by making the bristles splay out in all directions, but rather that you should press down hard enough so that the brush forms a kind of L, with the hairs bending at a right angle to the brush handle. See what kind of color coverage you get this way.
(4) Now take your largest round brush and try the same three exercises. Chances are that the round brush will give you a rougher, less distinct stroke than the squarish stroke of the large, flat brush.
(5) So far, you’ve been working with fluid paint. Now squeeze out a dab of tube color on your palette and don’t add any water. Wet the large flat brush, get rid of most of the water, and dip the brush into the pasty tube color. Drag the gummy color across the paper surface and see how this thicker paint consistency behaves. Do the same thing with a large round brush. You’ll find that the stroke has a fascinating, crusty quality which is quite different from a drybrush effect that’s executed with more fluid paint.
(6) Try these exercises with your smaller flat and round brushes. With practice, you’ll find that you can execute small, precise drybrush strokes that are excellent for painting the grain of wood, the cracks in rocks, weeds and grasses, and other linear elements that need to be broken strokes rather than solid, continuous strokes.
Once you get the hang of it, drybrush is such a fascinating technique that you may be tempted to paint a whole picture this way. Don’t! Drybrush is most effective when used sparingly. Use it for that mass of trees on the horizon, but not for the sky; those drybrush trees will look a lot more e
ffective against a flat or graded sky wash, or against a stormy wet-in-wet effect. It may even be a mistake to use only drybrush for that rock formation or that old wooden barn. The drybrush will have much more impact if you establish the general color of the rocks or the barn with a flat or graded wash—or maybe a drybrush wash—and then add a few precise drybrush strokes for texture and detail.
Cuenca, Spain by Eileen Monaghan, A.N.A., A.W.S., acrylic on 300 lb. watercolor paper, 22”x30”. This architectural subject is worth careful study for its combination of strokes, textures, and superimposed transparent washes. The rough surfaces of the walls are rendered by a series of transparent washes, roughly applied with hints of drybrush, to create a sense of broken color. Over and into these washes, the artist has applied a random, but controlled, pattern of smaller strokes to indicate stonework, roof tiles, balconies, etc. Compare the sparkling drybrush strokes (with breaks of light between them) on the rooftops with the delicate precision of the more fluid, melting strokes used to suggest the masonry on the wall at the center of interest. Even within the darks of the shadowy walls and windows, details are suggested.
Blind Girl by Charles Schorre, acrylic on 140 lb. watercolor paper, 20”x24”. Here’s striking evidence of the remarkable ability of acrylic color to produce rich darks that retain their sense of luminous transparency, even when the dark passages verge on total blackness. It’s best to build such passages wash upon wash in order to retain this transparency. Notice how touches of detail continue to emerge from the blackness, just as the girl’s figure melts away from light into dark. The light areas are strokes of semi-transparent color which allow tone to come through; study how these touches of light are used to model the nude figure and the scumbled light area behind her head.
Drybrush and Acrylic Mediums
Now that you’ve explored drybrush with acrylic tube color and water—which isn’t enormously different from working with traditional watercolor—you should now try some of these same techniques with acrylic tube color, water, and various acrylic mediums. The point, of course, is that acrylic mediums give you much greater control over your paint consistency. This greatly increases the range of possible drybrush effects. Here are some more exercises to try.
(1) Mix up a wash of acrylic tube color, dilute it with a half-and-half combination of acrylic medium (matt or gloss) and plain water. This will give you a thicker, creamier consistency than a simple mixture of tube color and water.
Once again, take your biggest flat brush and lay what I’ve called a drybrush wash. You’ll remember that this is the kind of wash that you put down by holding the brush parallel to the painting surface and pressing the bristles down with your thumb or a couple of fingers as you pull the brush along. You’ll see that the creamier consistency of a wash that contains acrylic medium allows you to brush the color onto the paper much more smoothly and more easily; the wash literally feels a bit like thin oil paint, although the effect is definitely watercolor.
(2) One by one, pick up each of your brushes—your biggest round brush, your smaller flat and round brushes—and try out all the drybrush exercises I outlined in the previous section. (At this point you’re still working with the wash of acrylic tube color, medium, and water.) Above all, you’ll find that the slightly thicker, creamier consistency of the wash will make it much easier to drag your brush across the ridges of the paper without the color settling into the valleys. Because the fluid color has been slightly thickened by acrylic medium, the color is more inclined to stay where you put it.
(3) This time, mix up a pool of color that’s just paint from the tube and straight acrylic medium, either matt or gloss. This will give you a much thicker pool of color. Go back and try all these drybrush effects once again. Compare the way the brush behaves when you work with these three different paint consistencies: tube paint and plain water; tube paint, medium, and water; and tube paint with just plain medium. As the paint thickens, your brush is apt to move more slowly, the paint is more likely to stay where you put it, and the paint itself looks heavier and more substantial on the paper.
What you’re learning is the fact that the range of drybrush effects is much greater than you think, and these effects are determined by many different “variables,” to use scientific lingo. You can adjust your paint consistency from very fluid to very thick. You can control how much paint you deposit on the paper by the way you hold the brush: parallel to the paper, at right angles to the paper, or at some angle in between. You can also affect how much paint you deposit by how hard you press against the paper: the brush can glide delicately along, be pressed down by your thumb, be jammed into the paper, etc.
I might add one further “variable”: you ought to experiment with speed, drawing the brush more quickly or more slowly across the painting surface. A quick stroke with slight pressure will leave only a delicate trace of paint, while a slow stroke with lots of pressure will deposit much more paint.
(4) Acrylic gel medium makes it possible for you to do something which is unthinkable in traditional watercolor. Squeeze out a dab of tube color, and then squeeze out a dab of gel medium right next to it on the palette. Wet a medium sized brush, flat or round, and shake out most of the water so it’s damp, but not sopping wet. The brush should have just enough water in it to allow you to blend the tube color and medium into a mixture like stiff mayonnaise. By the time you finish mixing the tube color and the gel, your brush will be covered with gummy paint—really too much to paint with. So wipe the brush on the palette a few times to get rid of some of the paint, leaving just enough color on the brush to make a variety of drybrush strokes.
If the blend is thick enough and if you’ve got enough paint on the brush, you can build up a drybrush passage that has a slight impasto. That is, the paint will be thick enough to stick up a bit from the paper. It won’t just look rough to the eye; when it dries, it should feel rough to the fingertip. Yet the paint will be luminous and transparent.
If you really want to build up your paint texture, allow this rough passage to dry, then brush on some more. By applying several layers of drybrush with gel, allowing each layer to dry before you put on the next, you can produce some really fascinating textures. Rocks can look rockier, weathered wood can look even more weathered, and you can begin to rival the weight and depth of an oil painting. But let me repeat my warning: if ordinary drybrush is to be used sparingly, then this kind of drybrush impasto should be used even more sparingly. Don’t let it dominate the picture. Your painting will begin to look like it was executed on sandpaper.
Tube color diluted with acrylic medium lends itself especially well to drybrush painting. To paint this sample, a flat brush was dipped into a mixture of tube color, matt medium, and just a touch of water. The brush was drawn down the paper in a series of vertical strokes, starting at the left and ending at the right. With each stroke there was less paint on the brush, and more paper showed through the stroke. The thickness of the paint gives you greater control than you’d get if the color was diluted only with water; the heavier paint is less inclined to flow over the paper, more apt to stay exactly where you put it.
An important rule to remember in drybrush painting is this: the thicker the paint consistency, the rougher and more ragged the drybrush effect. These drybrush strokes were painted with tube color blended with gel medium. Even where the paint is heaviest and darkest, flecks of light still shine through. In the lighter areas the gummy paint rests only on the peaks and never flows down into the valleys of the painting surface. This paint consistency is especially useful for painting rough textures like rocks, tree trunks, and weathered architecture.
(5) You’ve just learned that you can put one drybrush passage over another if you allow each layer of paint to dry before you apply the next. This is one of the unique qualities of acrylic; unlike traditional watercolor, acrylic dries insoluble, as I’ve said, and a fresh layer of wet color won’t dissolve or stir up the layer underneath. This can be particularly valuable in drybrush p
ainting. For example, suppose you want to paint an old, crumbling wall in which the gray masonry has been overlaid with traces of paint, a layer of moss, and various stains left by years of exposure to the elements. You may want to apply several different coats of drybrush in several different colors. You can do this in acrylic, but it may be hard to do it with traditional watercolor.
The way to do it in acrylic is to paint the general tones with a flat wash, a graded wash, or perhaps a drybrush wash—whichever you think is best. When this is dry, you can drybrush on one color, let it dry, drybrush on a second color, continuing the process of painting, drying, and repainting until you’ve got what you want. The final effect can be rich tapestry of color and texture. When you’re working in traditional watercolor, each new drybrush application is likely to scrub off or stir up the soluble paint underneath.
(6) Here’s another drybrush effect which is possible only with acrylic. Put down a solid, dark tone and then let it dry. When the underlayer is dry, drybrush a lighter, semi-opaque color over it and let this dry. Now apply a transparent wash of color over the previous two coats. You’ve taken advantage of the unique character of acrylic to drybrush light over dark; you’ve then reestablished the feeling of transparency by glazing a third color over the other two, like a sheet of glass.
