A Guide to Choosing the Perfect Watercolor Subject: Increase Your Chance at Success!

A lot of times in workshops, students will come up to me and want some help thinking through how to approach a specific scene. Unbeknownst to them, sometimes they're holding a reference photo that is really difficult to paint. 

Now, I don't tell people they can't paint a certain scene. Growth happens when we stretch ourselves. But it's important to know what you're up against and how to choose watercolor subjects that play to your strengths (and the strengths of the watercolor medium). 

This blog (and video) will help you make good selections when it comes to a watercolor subject.  

How to Pick What to Paint in Watercolor

Before we even touch our brush to the paper, we make some essential decisions. One of those is what we're going to paint. 

Here are 3 pieces of advice that will help you choose a subject that will work for you!

1. Avoid Subjects with Many Positive and Negative Shapes

The thing about watercolor is we are painting from light to dark. The lightest light that we have is the white of the paper. So we almost have to think in reverse to artists in other mediums. We have to think from light to dark, preserving the light from the beginning, all the way through to the end of the scene.

So my first piece of advice is to avoid subjects with a lot of positive and negative shapes - a lot of lights and darks all intermingled together.

A positive shape is one that you paint on directly with your brush.

A negative shape is one that you paint around to define.

When we have a scene with an extreme blend of positive and negative shapes, light and dark areas combined, it makes for a difficult subject to paint.

I'm not saying you can never paint scenes like this, but especially if you are just starting out, you're going to find yourself in a difficult situation by continually trying to paint around all the little light areas of the scene.

2. Crop Photos for a More Paintable Scene

One of the best things that we can do when we are picking a subject to paint is to crop our photos. A good example of this recently was I was able to visit Seoul, Korea and Tokyo, Japan, and as you can imagine, the density in these places is just unbelievable.

To find something that's patentable, I really had to look around and be selective and do some cropping on my photos.

My Original Photograph

My Cropped Photograph

My Painting

When you see a busy street scene, maybe there's a little interesting area of that scene you can crop into and find that painting take a lot of reference photos, but before you start to paint them, zoom in and crop around. Play with your composition and simplify these reference photos before you take them on. Find those special little areas within your scenes that can simplify what you're going to paint, but also have a nice feel for the subject matter that you're looking at.

3. Avoid Flat Subjects

Avoid subjects that are completely flat. When I say flat, what I mean is there's no dynamic light in the scene.

For example, when I was on this trip to Asia, most of the days that I was there were gray, drizzly, cloudy. A lot of my reference photos looked like this. 

When there's not light in the scene, it really flattens the values in the scene. There's not a lot of contrast.

I like painting light not only because I like the feeling and the glow of light in scenes, but also when there is light, there are shadows, and shadows are a great unifier in the scene. They create a nice connecting shape into the scene. They ground things to the ground.

But when you don't have light and you don't have shadows, it makes for a really difficult subject.

So, instead, choose the scenes with dynamic, interesting light. Notice the scene in the section above that I ended up painting. I chose it largely because of the light and shadow.

Want a Challenge? Embrace Practice Exercises!

We always want to push ourselves and to paint things that excite us. It's good to challenge ourselves, but if you are going to take on something new, do a little prep work before you just jump in and try to paint a fully rendered scene. Do a little bit of practice beforehand, do some color mixing to make sure that you understand how colors are going to mix on the paper. Do a value study. Isolate the most difficult part of the scene and try to render it on a separate piece of paper.

Most importantly, be honest with yourself about what is difficult for you and push yourself little by little.

Sometimes you might take reference photos or come across intriguing subjects that you're not ready to paint. Hold on to them and paint this further down the road when you've developed your skills and are ready to take on the challenge. If you keep working at it, you'll soon be able to take on more challenging subjects. 

Next Week's Topic: Explaining Common Watercolor Terminology

Next week, I'll be continuing my Beginner Watercolor Series, I'm going to go over popular watercolor terms and explain what they mean and talk about how I use these different techniques within my paintings. So if you're not already subscribed, hit that subscribe button, press that bell notification.

I post a new video every single Monday. You're not going to want to miss any one of these.

Related Blogs

Pick the right subject for watercolor - 3 Step Checklist

Learn to Paint a Watercolor from a Photo with These Easy Steps

Capturing Light in a Watercolor Street Scene