Watercolor is not a difficult medium because it needs a steady hand. It is difficult because it runs on two rules that are the reverse of every other kind of painting, and almost everyone spends their first month fighting them.
Learn the two rules first and the rest is practice.
Rule one: the white is the paper
There is no white paint in traditional watercolor. Every light in the picture is a place you decided in advance not to paint, and once a passage is dark you cannot make it light again.
This is why watercolor demands planning in a way acrylic does not. Before you touch the paper, work out where the very lightest areas will be: the top of a cloud, the highlight on a jug, the spray on a wave. Then paint around them for the rest of the picture.
Two aids are worth knowing about. Masking fluid is a removable liquid you paint over an area to protect it, peeled off at the end. And a clean damp brush or a corner of tissue will lift color back off while the wash is still wet, which recovers a highlight you have lost.
Rule two: light to dark, always
The opposite of the advice we give for acrylic on a numbered canvas, and the difference is worth understanding rather than memorizing.
Acrylic is opaque, so a dark color buries whatever is underneath, and you can go in any order. Watercolor is transparent, so every layer shows the one beneath. A wash laid over a dark passage does not cover it, it darkens it further.
So you build from the palest wash toward the darkest, and the darkest accents go on last, in the final ten minutes.
The paper matters more than the paint
This is where beginners are most often let down by their materials. Ordinary drawing paper buckles, the wash dries in blotches, and no amount of skill fixes it.
Look for paper sold specifically as watercolor paper at 140lb or heavier, which is roughly 300gsm. Below that it needs stretching or taping down or it will cockle. Three surfaces are sold:
- Hot pressed is smooth, good for fine detail and botanical work, and less forgiving of a loose wash.
- Cold pressed, sometimes labeled NOT, has a medium texture and is the general-purpose choice. Start here.
- Rough has pronounced tooth, which breaks up a dry brushstroke beautifully and is harder to control.
Cotton paper behaves better than wood pulp, holds a wash without drying patchy, and costs considerably more. It is the upgrade that makes the most difference once you are past the first few weeks.
Pans or tubes
Pans are dry cakes you wet with a brush: compact, tidy, ideal for painting away from a table. Tubes give you strong color quickly without scrubbing, which matters for large washes.
Either is fine to start. A small set of eight to twelve colors teaches you more than a set of forty-eight, because you have to mix.
The four techniques that cover almost everything
Wet on dry
Wet paint onto dry paper. Hard, controlled edges. This is your default for anything with a defined shape.
Wet on wet
Wet paint onto paper you have already dampened with clean water. The color spreads and softens on its own, which is how skies, mist and distant hills are made. You have limited control and that is the point.
The graded wash
Tilt the board slightly, lay a strong band of color across the top, then add water to the brush for each successive stroke so the color weakens as you come down. The bead of wet paint at the bottom edge of each stroke is what blends them together, so keep it moving and never let it dry out mid-wash.
Dry brush
Very little water on the brush, dragged across dry paper. It catches only the raised texture and leaves a broken mark. Good for grass, weathered wood and sparkle on water.
Four things that catch everyone out
- It dries considerably lighter than it looks wet. Mix stronger than seems right. A wash that looks correct on wet paper will be a disappointment an hour later.
- Cauliflowers. Those hard-edged blooms that appear when you touch a wetter brush into a wash that is half dry. There is no fixing them, only avoiding them: once a wash has started to lose its shine, leave it completely alone until it is bone dry.
- Overworking turns everything gray. Watercolor is at its best when a passage was laid down once and left. Going back into it to correct something almost always makes it worse.
- Too many colors in one mix. Two pigments make a clean color, three usually make mud. If a mix has gone dull, start it again rather than adding a fourth thing.
Brushes
One good round brush around size 8 or 10 will do most of a painting: it holds a lot of water and still comes to a point. Add a large flat or a mop for washes and a small round for detail, and you have everything you need. Natural hair holds more water; good synthetics are cheaper and spring back better. The care is the same either way, and our note on keeping a small brush precise applies directly.
A word on where the medium came from
Water-based pigment is about as old as painting itself, but transparent watercolor as we would recognize it developed in Europe, and it was British landscape painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who made it a serious medium in its own right rather than a way of tinting drawings. J. M. W. Turner is the name most associated with that shift, and his watercolors are worth looking at for exactly the reason above: enormous effects made from very few, very confident washes.
If you would rather have the picture than the practice
Watercolor rewards patience and it punishes a hurried evening, which makes it a poor choice if what you want is something restful after work. Our numbered kits are acrylic for that reason, and if you have wondered why watercolor kits are rare, our piece on watercolor paint by number explains what goes wrong when the two ideas are combined.
The designs are in the full collection, and the surface question is covered in types of canvas for painting.
