Watercolor is paint made of very fine grains of color held together by a binder, a glue that dissolves in water, usually gum arabic, the dried sap of acacia trees.
The painter thins it with water and brushes it onto paper in thin, partly transparent layers called washes. The white of the sheet shows through them and gives the colors their light. Where the painter wants pure white, that spot is left bare.
The sheet at the top of this page is a watercolor by the English painter J. M. W. Turner. He made it in 1842, and it shows the Rigi, a Swiss mountain, at sunrise. It is known as the Blue Rigi.
The name of the paint is as plain as the paint itself. In English, watercolor joins the two words water and color. When it first appeared, in the 1590s, it meant the pigment alone, and only in the nineteenth century did it come to mean a picture painted with it.
The French say aquarelle, from an old Italian word, acquarella, built on acqua, water.
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Because each wash is transparent, it is hard to correct. A pale wash laid over a dark one cannot be seen at all, since the darker color shows straight through it. So a painter cannot hide a mistake under a lighter color, and every white has to be planned before the first stroke.
In 2007, the Blue Rigi was at the center of a national appeal. More than 11,000 people in Britain gave money, many of them a few pounds each, to keep one sheet of paper in the country.
Dürer and the hare
Turner's paint is much older than its English name…
What You'll Discover
What Dürer added to his watercolor hare.
Why explorers and war artists carried watercolors.
Why painters founded a society just for watercolor.
How painters took paint back off the paper.
Why Winslow Homer stopped working as an illustrator.
What one brushstroke of a Turner cost in 2007.