If you’re frustrated with a lack of progress and want to know how to improve your watercolor skills, then know you are not alone!
Every beginner goes through a phase where they don’t see any improvement, I know I was a victim of this too.
Not to worry though because I’m going to share practical steps that improved my watercolor painting skills and made a huge impact!
Let’s get into it…
Learn all about color mixing
Color mixing is something you’ll need to continuously learn and improve. You’ll be using your color mixing knowledge and skills regardless of your subject or skill level.
If you’re a complete beginner, then start with learning all about color theory, warm and cool colors, complementary colors and how to mix neutrals.
It doesn’t stop there however, you can familiarize your self with the colors in your palette by experimenting with color mixing charts.
I have several resources to catch you up on your color mixing skills:
The Importance of Values
What made a huge difference in the quality of my work was learning to portray values correctly! This refers to the light, medium and dark areas of your painting.
So many beginners struggle with this and it can make such a difference in transforming your paintings from being 2D to 3D.
If you want to get better at painting values, then you need to work on your observational skills.
Organize some sketching sessions focused solely on obaserving and roughly sketching out the lights, medium and dark values from your reference.
Your sketches should be monochromatic (this means using only one color). This way your improving your observational skills without worrying about the confusion of different colors.
Another option you have is to create graphite pencil sketches instead. This will narrow your focus towards observing and noting down the values.
Try these watercolor practice value exercises:
Smaller paintings to improve your skills
If you want to progress faster then paint smaller first, this way you have plenty of time to practice, make changes and focus on specific elements.
You see, watercolor painting is made up of tiny skills such as, observing, working different techniques, color mixing…etc.
Focusing on all of them at once can be overwhelming and hinder your progress.
I like to have painting sessions that are focused on one thing I want to improve. An example could be doing wet on wet sunset sky studies where I focus soley on painting sunsets.
Understanding the techniques & their effects
As a beginner, you’ve probably been introduced to the basic techniques such as wet on wet, wet on dry, layering, and blending.
But you need to truly understand them and their effects in-depth.
You also need to understand how they can work together in your painting. This comes by increasing your knowledge of the basics and then experimenting with each technique to create different effects.
Catch up on the basic techniques with my indepth lessons here:
Improve your drawing skills
Don’t neglect your drawing time! Yes that’s right, improving my drawing skills with a simple graphite pencil actually aided me with my watercolor landscapes.
Through my drawing sessions, my observational skills developed, I was able to work through and refine different ideas through quick pencil sketches.
The best part to learning how to draw is you develop your ability to translate values from your reference onto paper.
Learning to draw will unlock whole new possibilities of different subjects! You won’t have to waste time getting stensils to trace before you paint.
Upgrade to better supplies
Of all the watercolor supplies, paper makes the biggest difference. The results you get by practicing on 100% cotton paper is unmatched.
This is mainly because controlling the water on cheaper student-grade paper is so much harder. The paint dries quicker and unevenly risking unwanted blooms and backruns.
Cotton paper absorbs more water, and dries evenly allowing you enough time to work and create beautiful results.
I highly suggest reading up and understanding your supplies better so you can make an informed decision before purchasing new supplies:
Master water control
When painting with watercolor, you’re constantly adjusting the amount of water in your paint mixtures, brush and paper.
There’s no right amount of water to use because it depends on which effects you want to achieve.
You need to understand the amount of water in your brush vs the paper vs the paint mixture creates different results.
The first exersice in the article below will help you understand water to paint ratios a little better:
Plan before you paint
I always say make a plan before you paint.
Planning includes, observing your reference properly, noting down what elements to include and leave out.
Seeing where the lights, medium values and dark areas are. Finally, noting down which colors to put in your painting.
After you’ve observed and taken note of the important details, it’s time to make some practice sketches, and see what works better.
Now it’s time to decide what effects you want to achieve in your painting. This will guide you in deciding what techniques to use.
Do you want to create soft diffused edges? Then wet on wet is the way to go!
When planning your painting visualize how you’re going to paint each layer in your painting.
Don’t forget Depth and Composition
Composition in art is basically how you arange the elements in your painting in a way that’s pleasing to the eye.
I won’t go into too much depth on composition, but it’s something you should learn more about!
Finding ways to add more depth to my landscapes made them so much better. Some of these things included:
- Smaller elements in the distance
- Less detailed the further away things are
- Warm colors in the forground and cool colors in the background (this also depends on the subject)
These are more like guidelines rather than rules, meaning they can change with the painting subject.
However, learning them and considering how to make the painting in front of you depict depth accurately is a skill.
Once again, learning to draw will also help you improve your composition & depth skills.
Below you can see a composition study:
These are the 9 things I did that made my paintings a whole lot better!
Hopefully, you’ve learned something new and are inspired to improve your skills too. If you’d like access to more resources then be sure to sign up below: