5 Easy to Implement Watercolor Tips to Improve Your Paintings

Apr 19, 2023

As you grow and learn as a watercolor artist, there are so many lessons to learn, so many practices to incorporate. And sometimes you can feel years away from mastering them. These tips aren't addressing the huge, overwhelming parts of painting. They are quick, practical changes you can implement today.

5 Tips For Beginning Watercolor Artists that Can Make a Huge Difference

These tips I’m going to pass on to you today are small, manageable changes you can make to your watercolor process today. Some of them are specific to certain scenarios and others are more general, but all of them will help you polish and refine your watercolor paintings.

Keep reading for 5 unique watercolor tips you can apply today!

1. Find the Correct Perspective in Your Watercolor Painting.

I want to show you an easy way to find that correct perspective line in your painting to ensure that your painting looks accurate. Here's a recent painting that I was working on. And you see, I had this driveway here kind of in the foreground.

And I like the directional lines. Each one of these lines has to go towards the right perspective. And if that was off this area of the painting was not going to work. All I have to do is trace the perspective line of one and see where it goes. And that will tell me where all the rest of them need to go.

Let me explain what I mean by this. So when I painted the first sidewalk line, I realized that it was pointing to this car across the street. So I kept the end of my brush on that car and pivoted over to where the next line is to paint the correct angle of that line. Once you get the perspective right on this one, you can just pivot and all of these lines will read correctly. Find the right perspective on your first one, and that will unlock how to paint the rest of them.

This also works well for painting directional lines on the roads, buildings, and houses too. If you can think through that sense of perspective and simplify it, it will ensure that these little details in your painting are correct and help you take that next step forward.

2. Rough Up Your Watercolor Brush.

In certain situations, I recommend that you rough up your brush. For example, when you're painting trees, you can push down on your brush to make the edge of it look a little more splayed out.

This gives you a nice, organic shape, and if you use some paper with a little bit of texture on it, you can create all kinds of wonderful dry brush marks. When you’re willing to rough up your brush a little bit, you can create a more natural mark. This also prevents you from laboring over every little shape along the way and instead create an organic, effortless shape.

3. Practice Your Mark Before Adding to Your Watercolor Scene.

Tip number three is to practice your mark. We all know that watercolor is not a forgiving medium. There aren't a lot of ways to correct mistakes.

So we’ve got to be confident that we know how to make the mark we want. What I do is have a little piece of scrap paper on the side of my painting where I can practice before I set a mark onto my watercolor painting. This helps me ensure I have the right consistency on my brush and that I know exactly what I’m going to do before I place brush to paper.

A lot of times we have one chance to get this right. And so if we know what that mark is going to look like before we make it, we have a much better chance of being successful.

4. Mix More Paint Than You Need for Your Watercolor Washes.

Often if you're painting a large shape in your scene, you're going to run out of paint if you don’t mix more paint than you think you’ll need. This has happened to me often. I run out of paint in the middle of a wash, and then I have to go back and mix more.

The last thing you want to do when you're trying to create a beautiful, fluid, connected shape is to have to stop and mix and remix and try to get that same color over again. So be proactive here and mix up more paint than you anticipate needing, because inevitably it's probably not going to be enough.

5. Step Back Often and Assess Your Progress.

Number five is an important one that I am still working on myself. It's becoming more and more natural the longer that I've been painting, but I still have to remind myself now and again.

The final tip is this - step back from your painting often. When we're working on a painting, we're just right on top of it, really close. We're focusing on the little things when we need to focus on the big things - the value, the composition, the connected shapes.

One of the best ways to do that is just to remind yourself to take a step back and look at your painting. You want to know how the current area that you're working on is going to fit into the bigger picture of things. You want to assess the values in the different areas of your painting. You want to look at the edges and imagine how your painting is going to look as a whole.

Something helpful might be to put a little reminder close to your easel - a post-it note, perhaps - to remind yourself to take a step back and assess whether all the elements of your painting are working together well.

The Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

Many of my watercolor tutorials are focused on the big ideas, the foundational painting principles, the basics for beginning watercolor artists.

But the little things can also make or break the success of a painting. So keep these small recommendations in mind too, and see how they can refine and polish your watercolor practice!

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