Watercolour

“Watercolour” names the paint and also the pictures made with it. The paint is fine pigment held in a binder that dissolves in water, usually a gum such as gum arabic with additions like glycerine; it is sold dry in cakes or wet in tubes, and water is added when it is used. Painters most often work on paper. Because the colour is semi-transparent, the paper's white shines up through thin washes, and the lightest passages are often just paper left bare. Wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry are two of the ways of handling the paint, and each gives a different result. Gouache is a related paint with white pigment added, which makes it opaque, so the paper no longer shows through; it is often used for highlights in watercolour pictures. A Japanese encyclopaedia says that watercolour gained a firm footing as an independent genre in England in the early nineteenth century, and that Turner's transparent work, which exploited the blurring that water allows, strongly influenced later watercolour. The National Museum of Western Art presents its Turner exhibition as a retrospective of more than 80 works from the Tate collection in London, oils and watercolours among them.

Look along the edges of the colour: where a stroke ends sharply, where it softens into the next area, and where the paper is left bare.