ARE YOU GETTING DARK EDGES?

Are you getting unsightly dark outlines around the edge of shapes?

Almost certainly this is because you are bringing too much water to the paper. Let me explain; when you load up a brush, it contains both pigment and water. Hopefully, you’ll have mixed your paint up thoroughly enough to avoid any un-mixed pigment floating about to ruin your perfect wash, but water, also, can conspire against us. When you load up your brush, I recommend you always remove any excess by running the brush along the edge of your mixing vessel. Ideally, you should only have just the right amount of paint and water to complete the job (this is in an ideal world of course, and sometimes the effect will happen anyway, no matter how hard you try to avoid it – it can even, in certain circumstances be an attractive effect (advanced technique).

Water is both our friend and our enemy. We need it, of course, to transport colour and to allow us to disperse that colour in an even and efficient way. However, if there is simply too much water present, then it will sit on the paper and push the pigment to the edges of any shape and create the outlines I’ve just described. A further knock-on effect of this, when laid alongside a partially dried-out adjacent wash, would be to generate a backrun.