The Art of Blending

Techniques for brush colour blending

There’s never a perfect guide to mastering gradient effects as these techniques require, first and foremost, practice, but, if you’ve ever played around with watercolours, you might have a close image of what to aim for.

I would recommend you start there: a piece of paper (preferably something thicker), some water, a soft brush, and whatever paint, pigment or ink you want.

There are two ways of preventing the paper from forming crinkles.

1. Tape the diagonally opposite corners to a flat work surface using masking or art tape to reduce chance of damaging your paper. Next, tape the opposite margins, making sure everything is stretched out, and continue by adding a long strip of tape around the edges of the paper.

Keep in mind that, the larger and thicker the paper you’re using gets, the more care you’ll have to take in securing it, and the stronger the tape you’re using will have to be.

fig. 1 Untreated watercolour paper

Start adding water using an appropriate sized brush/ sponge, etc. Try to apply an even amount throughout, and spread it as quickly as possible. You’ll notice the paper swelling up immediately. Don’t panic if the surface is uneven at first, this can depend on your water application or paper fibre content and distribution, however, once the surface dries (and you should allow it to dry completely), the surface should return to its original shape provided it was properly secured. It’s imperative the tape stays in place throughout the process, and it’s recommended you don’t remove it until after your work is done.

2. Submerge your paper of choice in water. Depending on the type of paper, the time will vary from 4-5 to even 15-20 minutes for heavier sheets. You can test this out by holding it upright and attempting to bend a corner towards you: if the corner springs back into position, the soaking time needs to increase; however, if the paper completely folds under the weight of the water, you’ve probably gone too far. The corner should ideally hold its shape or slowly reverse back into position.

When the paper is ready, lay it on your work surface and use a sponge/ kitchen cloth, etc. to flatten it against the surface and remove excess water and the occasional air bubbles that might form on the surface. Please note that an ideal board should not absorb too much water as it could cause the paper fibres to stick to it.

Creating gradients

You will notice the paint applies and moves differently depending on whether your base surface is wet or dry. Unlike a miniature figurine, paper can be sealed to close off the pores allow the paint to dry slower. If you do feel like you need it, you can find a water base sealer at most art supply stores, just keep in mind to let it dry thoroughly if you’re aiming for a crack-free look.

Fig. 2 Water gradients on dry vs. wet paper

Here I worked straight from my palette: I laid out the pigment on one end, dragged it with my brush, quickly lifted and cleaned it and started adding water to the middle of the paper strip, mixing it in with the blue and diluted the pigment more and more as I went down. You can go back and forth in between the ends to control the colour and blend.

Notice the colour tone change and fade: this is important as you can learn the different shades you have to go through while re-creating a gradient effect on a figurine.

The next step is to find two colours that you like (stick to colours that are relatively next to each other on the colour wheel as these work best) to create a gradient effect between them and aim to use the second one instead of the water.

Fig 3. Picking colours from the colour wheel

Roughly divide your work surface to get somewhat of an idea of where the colours are going to go. I’d advise against tracing this on the figurine itself to keep the paint layers as thinly as possible, and steer against having to do any type cover ups. When progressing to a miniature, you can draw it up on a piece of paper if needed, especially at the beginning; you can even test it out there first if you’re unsure. Use your main colour at the end of a paper strip and mix them in equal proportions to find the middle tone.

Fig. 4 Tone division according to gradient

The idea is to fill in the spaces here with the intermixing tones. There several of doing this, either by filling in the blanks depicted above with a smudge of adjacent tones and blending the colours with each other, by adding the next tone or next base colour in increments separately without the use of the white space, or creating colour scale and swiping a brush across its surface.

This is me smudging the paint using a cotton swab:

Fig. 5 Using a cotton swab to smudge the paint from one colour to the other

You can probably notice that the transitioning is quite rough and you can still distinguish the base colours, but this is a technique that can produce good results if you practice blending and is easy enough to understand.

Here, I’ve smudged the paint with a brush:

Fig.6 Using a brush to smudge the paint to create a gradient transition

After swiping, I mixed the two tones in the middle here instead.

For this technique, using the intermediate third tone at the beginning can really make things easy. If you do decide to use colours at the opposite side of the chart, it’s best you go through intermediate colours and tones for a more natural transition (e.g. a blue to orange gradient can go through a green and an orange-brown tone before reaching orange). The idea is to learn how colours and colour blending works.

Here, I kept going back and forth into the two raw colours as I saw fit. Instead of using a clean brush, I kept a bit of the purple on and dragged the blue into it.

A useful tip is to wipe your brush on a piece of paper towel or cloth to get rid of any excess water or paint; this will help you control the blending.

Fig.7 Completing the transition using a mixture of techniques

This is very close to what I usually do on a figurine, except for the introduction of a mixing palette: I turn my palette into my watercolour paper and my watercolour paper into my miniature.

The key is to keep the paint from drying, both on your palette and work surface. What I personally do when painting figurines is take two blobs of paint and use my palette to mix the in between tones, by adding paint from one blob to the next in little increments. I keep a dollop of raw colour at one end and basically create a colour scale by dragging the paint to the other one, just like on the paper strips. This helps me see both the in-between tones I should be having on the figurine, and creates a fool-proof/ emergency stash of paint in case I can’t work the paint on the surface of the miniature as quickly as I want.

Fig.8 Palette gradient mix for miniatures

Pick up the tone you want to start with and even it out on the surface of the figurine, overlapping it into the next tone. You can either pick up paint from your gradient surface to transition to the next colour or use the raw, second dollop to add the tone in little by little. This is a bit of a guessing game and this is where all the practice comes in. You have to be able to control the amount of pigment that goes in to the colour to make it transition as smoothly as possible, keeping the mixture from drying out completely. This step will help you correct the tones if needed- don’t be afraid to come back in with your first colour to achieve this.

Work your way down the surface of the figurine until you’ve reached the second colour. Keep adding the more and more of the second tone to the first and blend. By the time you reach the end of the surface there should be almost none of the first pigment mixed into the second.

Don’t be afraid to cheat! Work with the figurine you have, see what looks best, a gradient effect doesn’t have to be a half and half job, play with the colour proportions as you see fit.

Add in a third or fourth colour! You can always pick up where you left off by using the last colour as a starting point for another gradient. Sometimes, you can come up with interesting textures by not mixing the colours well at all (think cappuccinos).

Fig.9 Adding a third colour

While the easiest way to blend colours is by keeping your palette from drying out, another way to go about this, especially with a surface you want to correct, is to add layers of thinned out paint on top of an existing dry painted surface.

I usually do this in two ways:

• Adding diluted paint and further diluting the paint on top of the dry surface

• Drybrushing

To add the diluted paint mixture, you have to go back to basic colour fades.

Fig 10 Fading colours

What you need to remember here is that the second colour will act as your white paper, and your goal is here to make the colour less and less opaque. Of course, there are instances where this won’t work as well as you’d hoped, so you may be forced to either repaint the gradient or correct the tones by slightly dipping your brush into the intermediary tone or even the base colour.

In some respects, drybrushing may be easier to achieve, especially on a smaller scale, but a follow up tutorial on that will be available soon.

This is how to create the transition using a swipe motion. This technique is great on large flat surfaces, it’s easy to build, and can be reworked and adjusted. A mixing palette is essential here, as well as using a flat brush. You will need to sequentially place small drops of colour on a surface and work your way down through the gradient. This is great if you already have a pre-mixed set but you can the shades on your own as well.

Fig. 11 Gradient drops

Fig. 12 Colour swiping

Here, I’m showing you the differences in colours but the droplets don’t need to have a space between them.

Ideally, you have to use a flat/ fan brush to swipe the colour from the droplets on the right to your left, however, you can use a sponge/ sponge brush (careful so that you don’t absorb the colour instead), a palette knife, or you can even slightly press on your brush so that the hairs are parallel to the surface of the paper, keeping it at a low angle, closer to the paper. If you’re using a flat/ fan brush, you can use the gradient you picked up on your miniature (keeping the brush loaded) or recreate a smaller version of the gradient on the figurine, depending on the surface you’re working with. Don’t be afraid to come back in and re-blend if needed, you don’t have to only swipe once, but rather, go back and forth with your brush for an even blend, and keep using your paint droplets as reference.