My top 5 watercolor beginner a-ha moments

When I first picked up a paintbrush, I had no idea what I was doing with watercolor. I treated it like markers: using a different paint for each color that I wanted to put down, coloring an area inside the lines, and getting confused when it behaved in a way that I didn’t anticipate. Here are the top a-ha moments that helped me learn how to predict what watercolor was going to do, and how to play to its strengths. (Hint: there are all about water control!)

1. Wet-on-wet = soft edges; wet-on-dry = hard edges

This is the first thing you learn in any beginner watercolor class, for good reason. It’s the key that makes everything else work! When I tried to just sort of figure it out without any instruction, I exclusively painted wet-on-dry, but when I took my very first watercolor class – night skies with Shelby Thayne – the key to making soft, diffuse blends was unlocked!

2. Paint goes where the water is

This basic principle helps me to predict a bunch of things, including the whole principle of wet-on-wet vs wet-on-dry. But also these key insights:

• The wetter the page, the more the paint diperses, though some pigments tend to travel further than others.
• The page should be evenly damp for wet-on-wet effects. If there are visible standing puddles, the paint will congregate there; but it will also become diluted and dry unevenly, so it will look blotchy when it dries.
• Wherever the water stops, you are likely to find a hard-edged line. If you wet part of your paper – say, painting a shape with clear water – and then drop paint into the water, the color will spread out within that shape, then come to a hard stop wherever the water stops. (The paint spread can happen slowly, and you don’t realize there will be hard line until the paper dries and it’s irreversible. To be safe, when wetting the page for a wet-on-wet layer, wet the entire page.)
• Touching elements will mix on the page. Two shapes painted next to each other will blend at the edges, even if they’re both painted wet-on-dry. The wet paint contains water which allows the adjoining wet paint to flow into it. Which color pushes into which is pretty random – some pigments are pushier than others.

3. Paint in layers

Layering – that is, letting the page dry completely, then painting on top of what you’ve already painted – is another crucial technique that didn’t occur to me until I was explicitly taught. In media that I was accustomed to, such as colored pencil and marker, while you may do some light layering of individual colors to achieve blends, typically you don’t think of an entire piece as a series of layers; you color each section of the page individually. And that is a way I still sometimes work in watercolor, especially if I am short on time. But there are certain watercolor effects that are only possible with layering.

Layering makes it a lot easier to paint two adjacent, different colors with defined boundaries, without having them all sort of blend into each other.

Layering allows you to do the technique of glazing, where you achieve a color blend by layering two transparent colors – say, blue over yellow to get green. The look is slightly different than you’d get from mixing the same colors on the palette or the page.

It was Kolbie Blume’s 10-Day Painting the Wilderness Challenge that really got me used to layering, especially the counterintuitive technique of laying down a wet-on-wet wash, then waiting for it completely dry, rewetting the page (completely! no hard edges!), and laying down another wet-on-wet wash on top of that!

4. Blooms happen when the paintbrush is wetter than the page

Blooms or cauliflowers are large splotches where the paint curls and creates odd shapes. As a beginner, I felt frustrated that they seemed to happen somewhat randomly. Until shockingly recently, I struggled to predict when and how they would occur.

My initial theory was that blooms happen when the paint is drying – when it’s no longer fully wet and not yet fully dry. But that’s not right, because you can actually paint into damp – and it can often be a great idea! With damp paper, you can get lovely soft effect that still has some definition, and is not as dispersive as wet paper.

But I wasn’t totally wrong, because blooms are more likely when the paper is damp. The reason is this:

Blooms happen when the paint on the brush is wetter than the paint on the page.

The wetter your brush and/or dryer your paint on the page, the more likely blooms are to occur. Painting wet into wet or damp is a constant dance of checking the relative wetness of your brush and your page.

You can test this for yourself using this exercise fromWatercolor Painting by Tom Hoffmann. Make a wet wash of some color on the page, then dry off your brush (or get a new brush) and load it with thick, concentrated, non-diluted paint. Draw a line of paint into the wet wash. Then, add a little water to the paint on your brush, and draw another line. Keep adding water and drawing lines to see what happens as the paint gets more watery relative to the wash on the page.

Here’s my exercise with Canson XL paper:

Paper matters, too: I actually wasn’t able to force a bloom on Saunders. The watery paint just disperses.

One of the early “rules” I learned was to stop painting when your wash has begun to dry. I no longer think that’s quite necessary, but as the paper dries, it does become increasingly tricky to balance the wetness of the brush against the paper. “Stop and wait until it’s dry” is still a good, safe rule of thumb if you don’t want blooms and you struggle to control the amount of water on your brush (more on that in the next tip).

Mostly, artists try to avoid blooms. But Claire Giordano taught me that blooms can be beautiful. It’s not all about avoiding them. They are actually quite interesting looking and can resemble some real life nature effects, such as curling mist. Flipping them from something I’m always trying to avoid to something I sometimes want made me understand them a lot better. When you only try to avoid them, they seem like an unpredictable bogeyman that could happen at any time. When you sometimes want them (and then struggle to get them!), you eventually develop a much more honed sense of when they may happen… and when they won’t. 

5. Always be dabbing

My earliest Color Spotlight swatches feature pale colors and lots of blooms. I was consistently using too much water. It took months for me to learn how to achieve the concentrated color mixes I desired.

The secret? Dabbing my brush on a piece of cloth like, constantly.

Swatching in particular requires a lot of brush cleaning because I don’t want to cross-contaminate my color mixes with another stray color. So I would always be rinsing my brush in my water cup in between color mixes. This tended to make my brush head very wet. Via the brush, I would then introduce lots of water to my next mix, making them diluted, pale, and insipid. I also tended to drip water on the page, causing blooms.

I had to learn to keep a washcloth (not just paper towel, I needed something more absorbent) by my water cup and after every dip in the rinsing cup, a dab on the towel. Dip and dab.

Other helpful tips for reducing the wetness on your brush:

• Tap the brush against the side of your water cup after rinsing it, and against the side of your palette after picking up a wet puddle of paint.
• If you only want your brush a little wet, you can dip it only partially in the water. The brush is good at sucking up water and evenly dampening itself, you don’t have to completely submerge it.
• You don’t need to clean your brush after every paint color. It’s okay to cross-contaminate your paint pans; you might just have to clean them off later. You can clean a dirty pan by sliding a wet brush over it a few times to remove the top layer of dirty paint.

Although I developed my brush-drying regimen for swatching, it turned out that keeping my brush dryer also helped me to get more vibrant colors in my paintings, reduce unwanted blooms, and create more defined forms in wet-on-wet painting. In wet-on-wet, I realized recently, your brush can actually be superdry, like drybrush dry, because the water on the page will dilute it further. Your brush needs to be so much dryer than you think!

Whether you are a beginner or an experience painter, do you remember any a-ha moments or insights that transformed your painting experience?