Watercolour Quotes & Sayings

The moth's enormous wings are velveted in a rich, warm, brown, and edged in bands of blue and pink delicate as a watercolour wash. A startling 'eyespot,' immense, and deep blue melding to an almost translucent yellow, luxuriates in the centre of each hind wing. The effect is one of a masculine splendour foreign to the butterflies, a fragility unfurled to strength — Annie Dillard

There was a village watercolour society and they'd come and paint in my field. I watched them from the window, the way they would struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment. God has made every angle on that beautiful, and I felt that tremendously. — Nicolas Roeg

(Of the main character seeing a new world for the first time.) The air was cold but not bitterly so, and it seemed a bit rough at the back of his throat. He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colours - colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are. His first impression was of a bright, pale world - a watercolour world out of a child's paint-box, a moment later he recognised the flat belt of light blue as a sheet of water, or of something like water, which came nearly to his feet. They were on the shore of a lake or river. — C.S. Lewis

It is remarkable how very individual technique becomes in watercolour. Every man of personality finally arrives at a method peculiarly his own, as unique as his own fingerprint. — Walter J. Phillips

Watercolour could have been used more by the modernists. It is so direct, and when the white paper convention is accepted, so powerful, even brutal, that it would seem an ideal medium. — David Milne

Watercolour painting is notoriously difficult - so much depends on directness and speed, and certainty of intention. Tentative or fumbling touches are disastrous, for they cannot be obliterated easily. — Walter J. Phillips

When the Taliban had found the paintings, Tariq said, they'd taken offence at the birds' long bare legs. After they'd tied the cousin's feet and flogged his soles bloody, they had presented him with a choice: Either destroy the paintings or make the flamingos decent. So the cousin had picked up his brush and painted trousers on every last bird. "And there you have it, Islamic flamingos," - "But he'll have the last laugh, the cousin," Tariq said. " He painted those trousers with watercolour. When the Taliban are gone he'll just wash them off. — Khaled Hosseini

In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best ... better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever ... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work. — Robert Motherwell

With watercolour, you can pick up the atmosphere, the temperature, the sound of snow shifting through the trees or over the ice of a small pond or against a windowpane. Watercolour perfectly expresses the free side of my nature. — Andrew Wyeth

When I see how several painters I know here are struggling with their watercolours and paintings so that they can't see a solution anymore, I sometimes think: Friend, the fault is in your drawing. I don't regret for a moment that I did not go in for watercolour and oil painting straight away. I am sure I will catch up if only I struggle on, so that my hand does not waver in drawing and perspective. — Vincent Van Gogh

There is the process of enlarging a watercolour, which actually amounts to copying its good points and improving its bad ones, and is interesting proportionately as the latter increase. — Walter J. Phillips

There was one of those sunsets beginning - the kind we've been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We've never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It's everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it's from atomic tests; but it's said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution. — Nadine Gordimer

What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it. — Vincent Van Gogh

Many of the old masters of watercolour painted from notes, with enthusiasm either unabated or renewed. It is hard to assume the same degree of concentration in the studio, but not impossible. — Walter J. Phillips

If I were a pattern, I would be the pattern of paint that a bird would make if you dipped a bird's wings in watercolour and then set the bird loose inside a paper lantern. I'm pretty sure that's it! — C. JoyBell C.

Turner watercolour — Kathleen Tessaro

Writing is like painting with watercolour, sometimes it's what you leave out at matters. — Haydn Jones

Clive Dunn, as I understand it, retired to the south of Spain, where he worked extensively in watercolours. I don't own any of Clive Dunn's watercolours. I loved him in 'Dad's Army,' loved him. But not enough to actually seek out his watercolour work. — Hugh Laurie

Copying is an art in itself, demanding the greatest technical ability, especially in watercolour. However well done, the copy invariably lacks that nascent, ineffable, but definite quality, provided by the furious enthusiasm with which an original is created, an essential spontaneity that defies reproduction. — Walter J. Phillips

With watercolour, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well. — David Hockney

Paint me by numbers and colour me in watercolour half tones. — Truth Devour

Watercolour is not especially difficult, but I must warn you to steer clear of those pretty English watercolourists, so skilful and alas so weak, and so often too truthful. — Camille Pissarro

Watercolour is probably the most satisfying of all mediums. Although difficult in the beginning, after practice its mysteries will unfold, providing the utmost pleasure for the dedicated. — Robert A. Lovett

On one wall there was a recent watercolour - Saint E.O. Wilson of Hymenoptera — Margaret Atwood