An Overview and an Example

While I’m not completely a novice in watercolor, I do need to build my skills.

My best watercolor painting of note is a painting I did last December that I’ve titled “Peonies in a Vase.” Now understand, I like the result, but at this point, I don’t believe I was using watercolor to its fullest potential.

I painted everything in single layers. Not much wet-into-wet. I’d paint a layer, dry it, and do it again.

I’d also use thin, weakly pigmented layers. I wasn’t very confident in my color choices or color mixing and thought that this was the best way to go to avoid or mitigate mistakes.

The combination of these two things made the painting less than ideal, or at least that’s what I think now. The painting isn’t as vibrant as maybe it could have been. Again, I still think it’s fine, but I want to make my future paintings better if I can.

But my confidence in color mixing still needs building. So, that’s what I’m going to do.

Back into It Starting with Some Exercises

I didn’t want to just jump straight into a painting. I needed practice so that I don’t mess up a painting and get demoralized. There were a few techniques that I wanted to focus on:

On the left you have various wet‑into‑wet swatches. I needed to practice wet‑into‑wet with various strengths of paint mixtures.

Since I had the greatest trouble with just getting that confident, strongly pigmented mixture, I practiced that first. That would be the leftmost first two swatches from top to bottom. Then, of course, I practiced painting colors diluted to a moderate strength and a weak strength.

Other than that, we have some gradients in the center top, I wanted to practice painting some leaves wet‑into‑wet, some wet‑into‑damp on the very bottom and rightmost.

Wet‑into‑damp requires a well‑timed application of paint. You have to do it just before the water loses its sheen, about 30 to 45 seconds. If you get it right, you will get lines that blend only slightly. They won’t completely diffuse out like pigment does in freshly laid water or wet paint.

At the top right is another wet‑into‑wet exercise, but it involves a technique I’ve seen from another watercolor artist. You lay down one color, in my case it was the purple mixture, heavily pigmented. You introduce the second color, also heavily pigmented, and in this case the reddish mixture, really pulling it firmly through the first. The key is firmly like you’re lifting the first color.

This technique, as I’ve seen from the artist I watched, gets her really soft and smooth transitions.

I didn’t get it completely smooth here, but it’s a start.