Teaching Bad Habits

As I was finishing the fourth session of my Wet Watercolor Techniques class for beginners, I realized that what these students had learned and were executing quite well are considered advanced watercolor techniques by most practitioners. Why? If these beginners could jump to this advanced level in four weeks, why are we wasting so much time teaching techniques that they clearly don’t need? I suspect that what we label “tradition” is little more than a perpetuation of the bad ideas and poor teaching methods by which we learned.

Most of what “traditional” beginners learn is really a set of bad habits that the professional watercolorists use rarely or not at all. Ask a pro how much drawing they do on the paper and they will say “as little as possible.” Ask how much of their painting is done on dry paper and they will tell you how they only use it for calligraphy marks toward the end of the painting, or if they do use it for larger areas, how they go back immediately and soften the edges and diffuse the interior.

I’m not criticizing tradition per se; rather, I’m saying that we need to rethink the traditional approach to teaching watercolors. The use of watercolor in Oriental art goes back several millennia, while in the western art, it only goes back one hundred years or so. The techniques developed by the Chinese were dictated by the materials of the time, just as they are today. Making one sure mark on dry rice paper was critical because that fragile paper tended to tear more easily when wet. Western artists solved the fragility problem by applying pigments suspended in oil onto canvas or boards. Homer, Constable, and the rest simply adapted their oil painting methods to watercolor and paper. Their early works reflect that practice, but if you look at their latter works you will see much more or the wet and loose effects that make watercolors so appealing. I had my beginners copy one of Sanford Robinson Gifford’s oil paintings, and the lovely diffusions in value and chroma that they achieved on wet paper in three minutes (with the help of gravity) would have been the envy of any oil painter as they labored back and forth with their feather brush. I love tradition, but in an era of strong durable watercolor paper, why bother teaching beginners what the pros have long ago learned to disregard?