The 3 Biggest Mistakes Made By Beginner Watercolor Artists

Today I'm talking about the three things that beginners get wrong with watercolor. If you can change even one of these things, you're going to be miles ahead of where you are now.

Fix These 3 Blunders And Watch Your Paintings Soar

1. Use Fewer Brushstrokes.

The first thing that I see beginners do is use too many brush strokes. When we have too many brush strokes, it makes the painting look overworked.

We lose our feeling of freshness, and we lose our feeling of depth when we use a lot of small brush strokes because they create texture all over the painting.

Imagine that you have some distant trees that you want to paint. It's tempting to use a small brush and paint every single bit with small repetitive brush marks:

But the more texture you add, the closer the trees are going to appear. 

If instead you take a medium sized brush and paint it in one mark and then add in a little bit of differences, you capture that distant feeling with much better precision.

A good painting is like golf: you want to get there in the fewest number of strokes possible.

To help create a stronger, cleaner, more efficient painting, start off with a large mop brush for the first wash, then switch to a middle sized brush for the connected shape. Finally, use a smaller brush at the end to add in the details.

If you can take this approach, you can paint a more cohesive painting that doesn't feel overworked.

2. Don't Focus Too Much on One Part of the Painting. 

Beginners don't often look at their painting as a whole. When they paint, they tend to focus on one small area and then move to the next little area.

When I teach a workshop, I inevitably will see a student hunched over their watercolor at almost a microscopic level, to make sure that everything looks just like it does in their reference photo. They’ll be focused on this tiny little area of the painting, forgetting the big picture.

What I want you to do instead is to take a deep breath, step back, and look at your painting as a whole. Ask yourself:

• How are the different areas relating to each other? 
• What is the most important part of the painting? 
• How can you downplay the other areas of the scene to bring emphasis into this one area?

When you start asking those questions, that is when you know that you are on the path to becoming a better painter. If you can start thinking this way, I promise it will make a difference.

3. Don't Paint With Watered Down Paint. 

The third thing that beginners get wrong when painting is using paints that are too light. If we paint with colors that are too faint or watered down, then we can never have dynamic light in our paintings. So let’s cover a few ways to achieve a full spectrum of values. 

First of all, you can get a richer mixture with tube paints than with pan paints. So if you’re still using pan paints, I highly recommend you switch to something like Daniel Smith tube paints. Here are the colors I keep on my palette. 

Secondly, we need to be thinking about paint consistency. 

 Here's what I see a lot of times with students when they are painting: when they want to switch colors, they go to rinse off the paint from their brush and they bring all that water to their next mixture. Without even thinking about it, they have a paint consistency with too much water that will be far too light a value.

The fix is easy. What needs to be happening after you rinse your brush, is you need to absorb some of the moisture off on a sponge. Then you can go get your paint.

Here is an early painting of mine. 

You can tell that I wasn't really understanding values, and I did not realize how strong I would need to paint the sky in order for the light to be really apparent in this part of the scene.

Painting too light was a big problem for me. But once I understood how to mix up stronger paint and got a better handle on values, then I was able paint something like this where the light was much more apparent.

You can create richer values and better paintings when you can learn to paint strong enough in this medium. 

Take This Advice and See Stunning Results

So those are the three pieces of advice I'd give beginner watercolor artists:

• Use fewer brush strokes,
• Think about the whole painting instead of hyper-focusing on one specific part, and
• Mix strong values and thicker consistencies.

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