This post is about the lavis technique in watercolor painting. Lavis is the French word for layering and is used when you glaze a layer over your watercolor painting. The lavis will generally be done using a special brush, but sometimes also the finger and the fingernail or various tools can be very useful.
In Europe, the use of lavis among the great classical painters mainly served as a tool for studying the clear-obscure. The best example is surely Rembrandt [July 15, 1606 – October 4, 1669, Dutch painter] who chose the lavis for all his sketches and Nicolas Poussin (15 June 1594 Les Andelys – 19 November 1665 Rome, a French painter in the classical style) creating small models with characters that allowed him to choose the desired light and then capture the scene using the lavis.
The main difficulty of the lavis in watercolor, is that it is irreversible, and another more specific difficulty of it is that its use should be thorough and coarse at the same time.
