How to Start Your Watercolor Painting (4 Steps)

Mar 30, 2022


Have you ever found yourself halfway through a painting and wishing you could turn back time? The thing about watercolor painting is that there is no easy way to course correct. In fact, the more you try to correct your painting, the worse it actually looks. 

 

This is why it's crucial to have a plan before you start to paint. Each step you take will benefit the next, and laying a good foundation is essential. 

 

So, today we’re going to talk about the 4 steps to prepare for a successful painting

1. Crop your photo to work for you. 

You are the artist, and you get to decide how to optimize your scene. If you’re working from a reference photo, get comfortable with changing it to suit your artistic vision. 

 

One way to do this is to crop the photo to fit the rule of thirds. To do this, you take your photo and draw a tic tac toe board on top of it. Where your lines intersect is where you want to have the most interest in your scene. This simple method can help you determine how to best crop your photo.

2. Rearrange elements of the scene.

After you crop your photo, ask yourself if the painting would be more interesting or more visually pleasing if you moved around some of the elements of the scene. Your loyalty is to your voice as an artist, not to the reference photo. So allow yourself to alter the scene to serve your purposes. 

 

As you do this, you're making decisions on what you find most important in the scene. You're thinking about your composition. As I mentioned in the first phase, you want to put the most interest on one of the thirds.

3. Think about the large shapes and the values of your scene.

 

Values are the thing that's going to make your painting work. What I mean by values is simply how light or how dark something is and how those values interact and relate to each other in your painting. 

 

The first thing I suggest you do when you're looking at values is turn your photo black and white because this simplifies the values. By removing the color, it becomes a lot easier to distinguish between the brightest parts of your painting, the middle values and the darks. 

 

From there, I recommend you do a value study. I learned how to see values from Andy Evansen, who is a fantastic watercolor artist. Here's his advice: first, you leave your light values as the white of the paper. Then you identify the large middle value shape of your painting, and you paint that or draw that as one large shape in your value study. Next, you go back in and add the darks and details of your scene. 

 

The final part of this step is seeing the shapes in our scenes rather than the objects. When you can do this, you will find that it brings unity to your painting. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and it's easier said than done. But the more that you practice this, the easier it will get for you. 

4. Plan the phases of your painting. 

I typically paint in three washes, and the first wash is made up of all the lighter values of my scene. I like to wet down both sides of my paper and then paint these values really loosely. I let the colors run into each other and merge on the paper. 

 

This is all about soft edges. In most cases, you're not going to have a lot of hard edges unless you're leaving part of your paper white because you need that strength of brightness for a particular object. But typically, I'm covering the whole paper with a light value wash. For phase one of my painting, I ask myself:

 

  • What are the lightest values around the scene? 
  • What colors am I going to need for all of these lighter values?

 

After your first wash, you are typically going to let your paper dry and then you're going to move into the second phase of painting, which concerns your large middle value shape. The middle value shape of your painting is the most difficult part. 

 

As you're looking at your reference photo and your value study, you're thinking about edge, you're thinking about value, you're thinking about color all within this middle value shape. You’ll plan how you want to mix your colors and which brushes you want to use before you even get to this step.

 

Then you’ll think about the darks and the details that will create the separations between shapes. This is typically the part of your painting that gets all the attention. But none of that matters if you haven't done your work and thought about your lightest values and your middle values before we get to the darks.

 

Let's recap this really quick. My 4 steps to prepare for a successful painting are: crop your photo, arrange the objects in your scene, think about values and large shapes of the scene, and plan the phases of painting it logistically. 

 

I know it's tempting to want to jump in and paint right away, but if you can do all of this before you put paintbrush to paper, you are going to have a significantly higher chance of being successful. And beyond that - you’ll be building skills that transfer to the next painting.

 

-Matt

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