How to lift watercolour with a damp brush
Lift watercolour in Easel by Zaweba with a clean, damp brush to soften edges, pull out highlights and rescue a wash, as you would on paper.
Lifting watercolour means taking pigment back off the paper with a clean, damp brush. Wet the brush, blot most of the water off, then stroke it over the area you want lighter; the brush draws the colour up into its hairs. In Easel by Zaweba watercolour lifts with a clean damp brush just like that, so the technique you practise on screen is the one you'll use on real paper.
Lifting is one of the most useful watercolour skills. It softens hard edges, pulls out highlights in a sky or on water, lightens a passage that went too dark, and rescues mistakes that would otherwise mean starting again.
Why it works
Watercolour is transparent and sits partly on top of the paper. While a wash is damp, much of the pigment is still loose. A clean, damp brush is thirstier than the paper around it, so when you touch it to the wash it soaks up water and pigment together. Once the brush is full, it stops lifting and starts putting paint back, which is why you need to clean it often.
How much you can lift depends on timing and on the pigment. Lifting from a damp wash is easiest. Lifting from a dry wash is possible but harder, and staining colours resist it.
Lifting a wash, stroke by stroke
Lay your wash and decide what you want to lift: a soft edge to a cloud, a streak of light on water, a highlight on an apple.
Clean the brush. In Easel brushes get dirty and run dry, just as real ones do, and C cleans the brush by default. A dirty brush puts colour down instead of taking it up.
Dampen the brush, but not too much. A sopping brush floods the area and can cause a bloom, or backrun, as wet paint pushes into drier paint. A damp brush lifts cleanly.
Stroke or press the brush onto the area. For a soft cloud edge, use a gentle sweeping stroke. For a highlight, press and lift. Clean the brush again and repeat until the area is as light as you want.
Timing it right
A wash in Easel dries in about 20 to 30 seconds of real time. The drying speed slider runs from 0.25 to 4 times, so slow it down if you want a longer working window for lifting. Turn it up once you're done and want to move on, or use Ctrl+D to dry now.
If you plan to lift a lot, work on hot-pressed or cold-pressed paper rather than rough. On rough paper pigment granulates, settling into the hollows, and those settled particles are harder to coax back out.
Lifting with other tools
A brush is the classic tool, but Easel also has a sponge and a foam pad among its brush shapes. In real watercolour these lift larger, softer areas, such as clouds and mist, and they're worth trying for broad skies.
For crisp, hard-edged light shapes, plan ahead with masking instead. Masking fluid or tape protects white paper so you don't need to lift at all. Lifting gives soft lights, masking gives hard ones, and many paintings use both.
Common problems and how to avoid them
Hard rings around a lifted area usually mean the brush was too wet. Blot it more next time.
Colour going back on means the brush is dirty. Clean it between every couple of strokes.
A lifted area that looks muddy has often been scrubbed. Lift gently and accept that some pigment stays.
Practising lifting in Easel by Zaweba costs no paper, and undo is always there, so it's a good place to get the timing into your hands before you try it on a painting you care about.
