Learn Watercolor Fast (3 Ways to Speed Up Your Learning)

Apr 06, 2022

The fact is, if you want to be a better watercolor painter, you need to spend more time painting. But, I have some advice for you that can optimize the time you spend on your watercolor painting and speed up your learning. 

 

Here are 3 Methods to Accelerate Your Learning: 

 

 

  • Paint small and paint often. 

 

 

Maybe you can relate to the desire I had when I was early on in my painting practice. I felt this need to paint large paintings like my favorite artists painted. I just accepted the typical practice as standard, and I put pressure on myself to paint large paintings too.

 

What I found, though, was that scaling down from a quarter sheet to an eighth of a sheet allowed me to paint more in less time. Scaling down allows for repetition that can really speed up the development of specific skills. Every time I'm doing a painting, I practice my drawing, my perspective, my values, and my brushwork. All of these things benefit from increased repetition.

 

Since watercolor takes a really keen sense of timing, the only way to improve on this is by practicing more often and getting used to the ratio of paint to water. Practice will help you to understand what's going to happen when your paper is wet, when it's damp, and when it's dry. 

 

 

  • Choose a simple subject. 

 

 

It's so tempting to try to grab a really beautiful and complicated scene with a lot of really small, ornate shapes. Choosing something like this - what I call a calendar picture - is not really setting yourself up for success. In most cases, you become bogged down with minute details rather than seeing the large shapes of the scene. 

 

So let's talk about three ways to pick a simple subject:

 

  • Look for simple shapes. We don't need an overly complicated scene with a lot of small shapes. Avoid complicated and messy scenes. 
  • Avoid a lot of positive and negative shapes. A positive shape is something that you can paint directly onto your paper, a negative shape is something that you define by what you paint around it. If you choose a scene with a lot of positive and negative shapes that is really a challenge in watercolor because we paint backwards. Our lightest values are what we paint first. And then as we move forward in the scene, we're painting around things and preserving those lighter values as we get into the later stages of our painting. So a scene where you have to preserve a lot of really small little areas of highlights, is going to be very frustrating. 
  • Zoom in on your scene. A nice, simple area of the scene can make a really fine painting. So find a little corner of your scene that has some interesting elements. Zoom in and look for nice big shapes and simple shapes and simplify the scenes that you are choosing to paint. 

 

 

  • Practice specific skills. 

 

 

There’s no rule that says when you sit down to paint you need to paint a complete painting. Early on, I thought this was the case. I thought every time I sit down and paint, either I can paint a painting, or I can't. Either I'm successful, or I'm not. But that's not the case. Be intentional about selecting things that you want to practice and improve in. 

 

I'll give you an example for me. I decided early on that I wanted to practice painting figures and skies. Painting skies in watercolor can be really quick. You know, you can paint a sky in 5 minutes. So I would do this, and then I would pull up a Google image of a crowd of people and just practice painting figures. Over a period of time, this really improved my skies and figures.

 

Putting in the work to practice specific skills that you know you want to improve might take an honest assessment of your work. If your drawing isn't up to par or if you're struggling with perspective, dive into those skills. If you want to work on your color mixing, take time to work on this intentionally.



All that is important, but here is a BONUS suggestion for you that might be even more important: Enjoy the process. With all of this added pressure of social media and creating an image of yourself as an artist, it’s helpful to take a step back and remember why you love to paint

 

Remember the joy of creating. 

Get lost in being creative.

Remember why you love painting. 

 

Elizabeth Gilbert says in her book, Big Magic, “You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or your failures.”

 

If you can become more attached to the idea of showing up consistently rather than the results of a certain painting, you're going to keep showing up. You're going to keep practicing. And you’re going to improve more quickly as a watercolor artist. We need the repetitions. We need consistency.

Try to tap into what keeps you going. 

 

Stop Overworking Your Paintings!

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