Watercolor Painting Tips for Beginners | Jerry's Artarama (2024)

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Watercolor Painting Tips for Beginners | Jerry's Artarama? ›

Summing Up Watercolor Tips For Beginners

Preserve white paper right from the start. Work out your composition with a thumbnail sketch before you begin. Limit your palette to maintain color harmony. Don't allow foreign colors to cause distraction - link them to the rest of the painting.

Summing Up Watercolor Tips For Beginners

Preserve white paper right from the start. Work out your composition with a thumbnail sketch before you begin. Limit your palette to maintain color harmony. Don't allow foreign colors to cause distraction - link them to the rest of the painting.

First, swirl your brush in some clean water and mix it on your paint palette to get the paint wet. Then use your brush to spread the paint mixture on your watercolour paper. Add more paint as you need, and you're done! Watercolour paints are activated by water so you can spread them on the paper.

Before you start painting you need to mix some paint. Choose any color you like. Begin by getting your brush nice and wet so that it soaks up plenty of liquid. Then load it with water and press it against you mixing palette to release a puddle of water.

There are two fundamental techniques in watercolor painting. You can't escape them… they are: Wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. Together, these techniques form a golden rule that is unique to watercolors, and highlights the broad range of possibilities in watercolor painting.

5 Pro Tips

When working with watercolor paints, you want to begin with the lighter colors and then work towards the darker ones. We do this because in watercolors, the white comes from the paper, not the paints. So due to the transparency of the paints, your light colors wont “pop” when painted over darker colors.

There are 2 basic watercolor techniques that will be fundamental to your practice—wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. In this tutorial, I cover what these terms mean, when to use each of the two techniques, and how to do it successfully.

If you are wanting to paint in a loose style, then I think a loose underdrawing is the way to begin. I find it is very difficult to achieve a loose expressive watercolor painting if you begin with a tight and detailed drawing. I like to create a very loose sketch with minimal lines directly on my watercolor paper.

Should you wet watercolor paper before you begin painting? The watercolor paper only needs to be moistened prior to painting if you intend to use a wet-on-wet painting technique. Wetting the paper can lead to buckling, making brushstrokes challenging to control because of the resulting bumpy surface.

What part of a watercolor picture do you paint first? ›

No rules. But the traditional approach to using watercolor is to paint from light to dark. Thus if your background is light value, you might paint it first. On the other hand, if your background is dark value, you might paint it last.

The benefit to painting the background wash first is that you are less likely to mess up the foreground object. For instance, if you were to carefully paint in the subject first (say, a red rose) and then paint in the background, you would risk getting the background paint on the rose, which might mess it up.

Blending watercolour while wet

If you're trying to blend two areas together, make sure they're both nice and wet – add more water to them if needed. Using a wet brush, touch one side of the area and pull or drag the paint down in zigzag motions to meet the other area, connecting them.

I teach myself to paint every day.

I used to feel a little self-deprecating about my status as a self-taught artist, but over the years I've realized that every artist is self-taught. The skills required for using watercolor with confidence can't be achieved except through use, no matter how many classes you take.