John Todd wrote:What is the difference between "water colors" and "oil colors"?
They're very, very different!
The biggest difference (besides the fact that watercolors clean up with
water, and oil only with solvents, yuck) is that oil paint is opaque, and watercolors are transparent. This has a profound effect on how you paint.
Let's say you wanted to paint a picture of a zebra on a grassy plain. If you were using oils, you could do it by painting the
grass, and then painting a black horse on top of it, and then putting white stripes on top of the horse -- it would look just perfect. That means that with oils you can do a lot of experimenting and kind of "sneak up" on your picture, slowly refining it over time. If you decide to add a second zebra next to the first one, you can do that!
But with watercolors, there's no white paint, only the white of the paper. If you want to paint the zebra picture, you have to paint the grass and the black stripes, carefully leaving the white of the paper where the white stripes have to be. It requires a lot more planning up front! Many watercolor paintings are all about how you use white (and light colors in general;) it's a way of showing off. If you look at my painting above, those white umbrella poles, and the white pilings under the building, and the signs, and the roof, all took a lot of planning to get right.
Another way in which oil and watercolors differ is that oil paints are thick and viscous, and they stay just where you put them, while watercolors can flow over the paper, soak in, mix together, etc. The watercolorist has to become a master of guiding the natural tendency of the paint to move around, and use that to his advantage. To use my painting above as an example again, much of the variegated color in the sky, water, and clouds comes from natural movement of flowing paint, and I had to guide it to create the effects I wanted. There's a nice element of controlled chaos to it -- you can never be 100% sure of what you're going to get. And there's no erasing, no mulligans. You have to take what you get!
Thanks for looking everybody!