What is Granulation Medium: with artist Rachel Levitas

Winsor & Newton Granulation Medium is an interesting addition to watercolour painting. What it does is separate the pigment from the water in mixed watercolour paint; you can actually see the tiny grains of pigment if you look closely. I like to use Granulation Medium to create ‘noise’ in my paintings; it works well on its own or in addition to salt and Art Masking Fluid. With Granulation Medium I can create a starry sky, smoke, twilight or fog effects.

What you'll need

Winsor & Newton Granulation Medium

Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolour Tubes

Winsor & Newton Watercolour cold pressed block

When mixing Granulation Medium add it neat to your watercolour paint. Stir and watch as the paint starts to separate into pigment and binder: the medium takes a few moments to activate.

Don’t go off and have a cup of tea while you wait for the paint to separate because you may find it continues to separate past the point of attractive tiny sprinkles and beyond into large sticky lumps of watercolour paint that are surprisingly tricky to remove from your brush.

Speckles of pigment in Ultramarine Blue and Opera Rose

A naturally granulating paint like Ultramarine Blue or Raw Umber will become even more grainy while even a staining paint like Opera Rose will separate into tiny speckles of pigment.

Another quality of Granulation Medium is it can separate the pigments of mixed paint so you can see drifts of the original colours, for example blue grains of Ultramarine Blue are visible in this Ultramarine/Alizarin Crimson mixed purple.

Feeling Inspired?

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