Watercolor Painting Techniques Some Basic Skills

There are a number of basic skills that, as a watercolor painter, you

will need to learn. This article is going to briefly cover just a few of

them. For more information, please check my signature.

The very first thing you will need to learn how to do is draw a flat

wash. You will start by mixing a generous amount of medium intensity

paint on your palette. You want to use a flat brush. A Winsor and Newton

965 will do fine. You then want to saturate your brush and paint a thick

straight line from left to right on your canvas. Four to six inches in

length is fine.

After drawing the line, you want to repeat the procedure making sure that

you start at the bottom of the first stroke. The flood of the first

stroke should evenly flow into the second stroke. You then want to repeat

this for a third, fourth and fifth stroke and so on. After you are done

and the canvas dries, you should end up with an even toned square of color

as if the whole thing were painted with one stroke. Like I said, it takes

practice but is very important to master this.

Similar to the flat wash is the graded wash. The procedure is almost the

same except for each line that you draw, you’re going to use a slightly

lighter mixture of paint. So on your palette, you’re going to have to

include several mixtures in order to get the right effect. When you’re

done, the top of the square should be the darkest, the bottom of the

square the lightest and as you go from top to bottom, the color gets

lighter and lighter. Again, this takes some practice but is important to be able to master.

Finally, for this article, there is the glazed wash. This is where you

overlap colors to make interesting designs. Get a palette with different

shades of yellow, red, green and blue.

Pick any of the colors and draw, using a 1 inch flat sable brush, a

straight line about 6 to 8 inches wide. Then rinse off the brush and

choose another color. The color itself isn’t important. What you want to

do is draw another design slightly overlapping the first one. You will

notice how the second color slightly modifies the first one. Keep

repeating the process using different designs and overlaps.

For more great tips, check out my signature below.