Why are my watercolor paintings so pale? 

I love watercolor paintings with juicy, brilliant color, but this can be difficult to achieve. One of the most common recurring problems in my paintings is pale color. (Sometimes I correct this in post so you don’t see it unless you see my disappointing paintings in person.) 

Let’s go over the reasons I’ve discovered why watercolor paintings can come out too pale – and some fixes! 

Too much water in the paint

The problem: The most common way to lighten value in watercolor is to add water to the paint mix. Naturally, if you add too much, the paint will come out too light. 

Tips:

• Mixing palettes with wells an encourage adding too much water to your mixes. I’ve come to prefer flat palettes: if the paint is thick enough, it won’t spread.
• “Too much water” is also known as “not enough paint.” Sometimes you don’t get enough paint when you try to pick up paint from dry pans. Try pre-activating your dry pans by spritzing them with water or dropping water into them and then waiting a few seconds before you start painting.
• Test mixes on scrap paper before adding them to your painting to ensure the values are where you want them. However, you may want to err on the side of “too dark” for reasons stated below…

Too much water on the brush

The problem: Even if I’ve mastered my paint mixes, I may still end up inadvertently adding too much water because I don’t account for how much water is already in my brush after rinsing it. 

Tips:

• Make it a habit to dry your brush after swishing it in your water cup. I like to knock off extra water on the side of my cup and wipe the brush on a dry cloth.

• Some artists insist that your brush does not need to be rinsed in between each color, and you should just go ahead and contaminate all your paints with each other, but this will depend on your tolerance for low-chroma mixes and a messy paintbox.
• Try using a brush that holds less water. Brushes that hold a lot of water include larger brush sizes and shapes like mops; natural fibers; and soft brushes (like squirrel or synthetic squirrel). They’re great when you want to cover a large area quickly, but can make water control more difficult.

Too much water on the paper

The problem: When painting wet-on-wet, colors come out paler than I intend because I do not adequately account for the extra dilution coming from the water on the paper.

Tips:

• Check if less water can be used to make the paper wet. Is the paper evenly shiny? Are there any puddles to mop up? Could a sponge be used instead of a brush to make the paper evenly damp? 
• Paint with stronger, less diluted color when working wet-on-wet compared to wet-on-dry.

Not accounting for drying shift

The problem: Some pigments have more drying shift than others, but honestly pretty much all watercolor paints have some level of value drying shift, meaning they dry lighter than they appear wet. The painting may look great wet, but still dry too pale. 

Here’s an example where I painted two skies, both using a mix of Ultramarine Blue and Phthalo Blue Green Shade. I painted the top sky so that it appeared the correct color when wet, and the bottom sky intentionally too dark and bright when wet.

The first image shows both skies wet, and the second image shows both skies dry. When wet, the top sky looked right, and the bottom sky looked garish. When they dried, the top sky began to look pale and indistinct while the bottom sky looked much more sky-colored.

Tips:

• Use pigments with less drying shift. Some pigments with high drying shift include all the perylenes and most transparent blues, like Prussian Blue, Phthalo Blue Red Shade, and Indanthrone Blue. Pigments with large particles, like cobalts and earths, tend to have lower drying shift. For darks, try multiple-pigment mixes instead of single-pigment blacks.
• This is the one I find most difficult, but you’re going to have to make it look ugly wet in such a way that it’s pretty dry. Make the colors too dark and/or too saturated. Now, it’s possible that in going for ‘too much’ when it’s wet you still end up at ‘too much’ when it’s dry, so you’ll have to hone your intuition through practice. Unfortunately, if it looks perfect wet, it will probably look too pale dry. 

Not enough layers

The problem: In theory, with enough practice and skill to hone water control and build drying-shift intuition, I may be able to achieve strong color intensity and wide value range in a single layer. But some paints have so much drying shift that it’s simply impossible to achieve a truly dark value without multiple layers. 

Tips:

• Plan for multi-layer paintings, instead of trying to get it done alla prima. A common strategy is to make the first layer intentionally too light as a sort of undersketch.
• Keep your plan flexible: let your first layer dry and then evaluate if you need another one. If your first layer(s) are too pale, continue to add more layers to build up the intensity of those sections that you want to look darker and/or more saturated.
• Save finishing touches for the end – after you’ve fully decided how many layers you’ll need. It’s a lot harder to go in and put in another wet-on-wet layer after your wet-on-dry details are down.

Conclusion

Watercolor paintings can come out too pale for a number of reasons, the chief ones being too much water and drying shift. One option is to keep adding more layers. Another is to try making your paintings so dark and saturated that they look like “too much” when wet – they might dry just right!