These clickbait watercolor videos will DESTROY you

Youtube is a treasure trove of tutorials and lesson videos, but it can be challenging to find the good stuff. One problem is the vague, clickbaity way that videos are titled and marketed. They overpromise some sort of massive, revolutionary secret that will transform your art. Then, the content of the video is generally very mundane. More often than not, I find myself ending the video thinking, “Huh? What was that title referring to again?”

Here are some examples of videos that promise a highly specific tip, but don’t tell you what it is in order to get you to watch. I close the curiosity gap so you don’t have to! Actually, I don’t think these videos are bad, so much as poorly titled.

Video Rundown

Antonio Bartolo via Artefacto: “This watercolor trick shocked everyone”

Artefacto Learning Platform seems to have fairly recently flooded Youtube with a lot of clickbaitily-titled tutorials. The tutorials themselves are… fine, variable, depends on the teacher.

I did rather like this one, more for the subject matter than the style of teaching. It’s fun watching Bartolo’s skillful and confident painting of this lovely scene, but he mostly doesn’t talk, so it’s just the noise of paintbrush swishing in water and things knocking around the desk.

It’s unclear to me what exactly the “watercolor trick” referenced in the title is, but I think it probably references a method near the end of lifting using tape. You draw on masking tape with a pencil as a means of pressing it down, then lift it to pull up paint.

I found that this works, in that it does lift the paint, but it also severely damages the paper (see the white strip to the immediate left of my pencil in the image above). I think it looks ugly and bad.

I’m not sure this shocked me but it did make me uncomfortable and dismayed. Close enough?

Liron Yanconsky: “This Crazy Watercolor Hack Leads to FRESH Paintings”

I like Liron but he is the master of clickbait titles and vague videos that feel inspiring while you are watching but leave you with no actionable advice. This can have value if what you are after is a feeling of inspiration, but frustrating if you are looking for specific tips. Water control is so second-nature to Liron that he can just distractedly lay down some effortless-looking washes and wind up with a perfectly formed street scene, but if I try to do what he’s doing, it looks like nothing, nothing at all.

The “crazy watercolor hack” he’s describing in this video is direct watercolor – that is, painting without a pencil undersketch. It’s not a hack, it’s a well known style. For example, I did direct watercolor several times for a 30×30 Direct Watercolor Challenge in June 2024.

Like much of Liron’s advice, “try direct watercolor” could be a useful tip for a person who’s learned enough skill to take off the training wheels and just needs a push to trust themselves, but “forgo a common support” is frustrating and unhelpful for a beginner.

What I’ll give Liron is that he reveals the “hack” in the first minute of the video and the rest is a watch-me-paint-this.

The Biggest Mistakes Watercolor Beginners Make

I won’t even attribute this to a single video; there are hundreds with variations on this title, each claiming that a different problem is that biggest hurdle for beginners.

Naming a video this way works because it evokes anxiety and inadequateness. Am I the backward beginner making an embarrassing mistake, and can everyone tell?

One problem is that identifying a mistake and showing how to solve it are different things. Often the mistake boils down to just “not being good at water control,” or some other skill that takes practice.

Another is that some of these mistakes are matters of opinion or degree. Each teacher seems to have a different bugaboo. Using too much of the same color, or too many different colors, or using black, or using white, or using supplies that are too cheap, or being too hung up on supplies, or being too literal, or not observing well enough, or using too much water, or not enough. It may very well be that the “mistakes” the teacher claims to be big problems aren’t your problems. Some of them may not be mistakes at all.

Conclusion

I’ve learned a lot on Youtube, but I’ve also wasted a lot of time. Look for teachers who limit the scope of their video to something specific that interests you; organize their content coherently; and don’t act coy and cagey about the information contained.