Is Your Watercolor Paint Fading? Understanding Lightfastness, Staining, and Opacity
- ranwatercolour
- Sep 25, 2024
- 3 min read
Hey there, art enthusiasts and watercolor fans! This topic is diving into the fascinating nature of watercolor paints and shedding light on three key characteristics that can make or break your artistic masterpiece: lightfastness, staining, and opacity.
Lightfastness: Preserving Your Art Through Time
Imagine spending hours of dedication on a stunning watercolor painting only to find its vibrancy fading over time. That's where lightfastness comes into play. This crucial attribute determines how resistant your pigments are to fading when exposed to light. Opting for watercolors with high lightfastness ensures that your creations stand the test of time, preserving the brilliance of your colors for years to come. Offcourse this is subject to how you store or display your paintings protecting them from elements like direct sunlight, moist, heat and so on.
Staining: Embracing the Ethereal Quality
Staining refers to how deeply pigments penetrate the paper fibers, creating rich and long-lasting hues. Artists seeking intense and bold colors will appreciate paints with high staining capabilities. On the contrary, if you prefer more control over blending and lifting colors, opting for less staining watercolors might be the way to go. So if you're an artist who prefer to paint slow then working with less staining paints will be helpful as it gives you the leisure to decide on adding more paint as you progress with the painting instead of having to decide in the beginning phase. Less staining paints are also helpful for lifting out pigments to create highlights and easier when correcting mistakes. In short, less stain less mess noticed.
Opacity: Unveiling the Beauty Beneath
Opacity in watercolor paints dictates how much light can pass through the pigments, influencing the depth and layering of colors in your artwork. Transparent watercolors offer a delicate and luminous quality, ideal for creating subtle washes and layered effects. On the other hand, opaque watercolors provide solid coverage and vibrant colors, perfect for adding highlights and details to your paintings.
Therefore it will be best to apply paints with high opacity towards the end of your painting process as they are deep and using them in the beginning stage as in first layer of painting itself may impose a hurdle to the transparent effect you were aiming to achieve as you layer your paints.
In conclusion, the interplay of lightfastness, staining, and opacity is what brings your watercolor creations to life. By understanding and harnessing these three characteristics, you can elevate your artwork to new heights by organising and planning your painting strategy. This helps you to work smart while you dive into the creative process achieving a tranquil way of creating art.
So, how do you determine or look out for these characteristics while you shop for your watercolor paints?
Shopping your paints
It's pretty simple as the paint manufacturers has printed them on the paint's label for your reference. However the labels are not standardised and vary from one supplier to another but all the 3 characteristics are definitely imprinted. The variation differs by number codes or symbols, otherwise they are pretty straight forward.
I use Schmincke Horadam Paints, so below is a photos of Schmincke watercolor paint labels as a reference.
The paint label details are also available on Schmincke's website (See sample below). So we can always refer to the color catalogue details furnished by the paint Brand's website. Quick and hassle free as you don't have to memorise every detail of your paint collections.
*Schmincke's Horadam watercolorcolor catalogue link :
So getting familiar with your watercolor paints is definitely crucial to ensure a delightful experience in painting. In order to understand the nature and characteristics of watercolor discussed above in detail, I have prepared a video demonstration and it's on my Youtube channel. Hope it helps you to visualise better.
*Above picture is a color swatch and organizer used in my video demonstration
Happy Learning and Happy Painting!
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