Watercolor is a medium known for its transparency and fluidity. There are three kinds of watercolor paint – tube, pan, and liquid. These water colours come in student grade and professional grade/artist quality. The professional grade has a higher concentration of pigment and better permanence ratings. Student grade paints use more fillers and may use cheaper pigments, making them more affordable, but not as satisfactory in terms of color, intensity, and permanence.

Watercolor paint is identified as transparent, semi-transparent, semi-opaque, or opaque. The semi-transparent and semi-opaque watercolors may also be called translucent. Transparent watercolor means that light is able to shine through the paint onto the white surface and reflect back to the eye, creating colors that seem to glow.

Water is the solvent that is mixed with watercolor paint to make it the right fluidity and concentration, whatever the type of watercolor paint being used. How much water any one mixes with the paint will determine how intense the color is as well as affect its transparency. Different hues can be created by mixing colors on the palette. Once the paint has dried, the water evaporates, leaving a color that is a little lighter than when wet.

Watercolor is reactivated when wet, unlike acrylic paint that has a plastic polymer binder, so can be reworked at any time after drying as long as it hasn’t been sealed with a varnish. This will render it waterproof and protect it from environmental factors such as light, humidity, and dust, but will also make it unworkable. Until then, student/artist can add color to a color that has dried in order to strengthen it or create another hue by mixing it with another color.

Watercolor is a great medium for many subjects and purposes. Artists of Uttarakhnad explored easy to abstract compositions on those in his/her techniques.