Watercolor Secrets: Pro Finishing Tips For Your Best Work

What's incredible about watercolor is that you can paint a fresh, beautiful scene fairly quickly. But the flip side of that is that it's not super forgiving or correctable. That's why the ending of your painting is so important.

I can't tell you how many times I have pushed through on a painting late into the night, feeling pretty good about the trajectory of the scene, just to mess it up in the final stages. 

It's beyond frustrating.

So today, I want to talk to you about my approach to finishing the painting that can save you this frustration.

3 Final Strategies That Make The Biggest Difference

1. Take a Break Before Adding Your Final Touches

Tip number one is to take a step back from your painting.

There is an exhaustion that comes at the end of a painting. After the drawing, the first wash, the second wash, and starting in on the darks and the details of the scene, it can be hard to focus. In fact, it might be the worst possible time to make decisions about a painting.

You've been thinking and working for a very long time. So before you start in on this crucial part of your painting process, give yourself a mental break.

Get your painting to about 80 or 90% and then step away.

Learn to recognize when you need to take a break, to step back, and to allow yourself to regain your mental clarity before coming back and adding the finishing touches to your scene.

Go for a walk, drink a glass of water, or take a nap, and then come back. Whether you take 20 minutes or come back to your easel the next day, this break can give you the fresh start you need to finish strong. 

2. Ask Yourself - Is the Light in My Painting Working?

After you've taken a break, come back and look at your scene. Your eyes are fresh now and you have a more objective view of your painting. 

Ask yourself these questions: Is the light working in the painting? Is there a part of the painting that is too muted?

When we are painting that first wash, we're setting up a lot of our initial values in the scene, but sometimes it's hard to judge how things are going to look once everything dries. Pigments can fade.

When you're painting the middle values and the darks, you might not get the values exactly right on the first try. So once things dry, take a look at your painting. Is there an area of the scene that you might need to do a glaze over to introduce darker values?

Glaze: an additional layer over part of your scene

Are there little highlights in the scene that you can get in with gouache or scraping?

Scraping/Scratching: the method of using a hard edge to scratch off pigment from a painting. 

Gouache: water-based paint made of a mixture of natural or synthetic pigments, water, and gum arabic. It requires water to spread across paper.

I use gouache sparingly, but I used it in the painting below on the rocks in front of the house. In the painting process, I had lost some of the form of the rocks. By adding in some darker areas and then painting the light side with a little bit of gouache, I was able to regain the depth and shape of the rocks here in the scene.

So before you call your painting done, take an honest look at the values of your scene. Sometimes there's not anything you can do and you're left with what you have. But other times you can do a little glaze to fix an area, or you can use gouache or scraping to make little highlights that will complete that full range of values that you want to have in your painting.

3. Bring Focus to Your Painting

The last thing you want to do - and I think this is the most important thing - is to take these last moments to bring focus to your painting.

The way that we focus the painting is thinking through our tools for creating interest in an area where we want our viewers' eyes to go.

The area that has the most contrast, the most texture, and the most vibrancy will get the most attention. Assess the area of your scene where you want the most attention (your focal area), and then reinforce that area.

• Do you need a little bit more value?
• Do you need more color in that area? 
• Does the area need more contrast?
• Could texture or vibrancy call more attention to this focal point? 

If you're being distracted by something on the perimeter or something else in your scene, then you might be able to shift attention to your main area by adding interest in that focal area.

One Last Tip on Finishing 

There's one more thing I wanted to mention when it comes to finishing your painting, but this tip is more a matter of preference. Some artists are going to really resonate with this piece of advice, and others aren't, and that's okay. But I want to share it with you because it's something that I think about in those last moments of a painting. 

At the end of a painting, I concern myself with how I can create an impression of a subject without spelling out every single detail.

I love paintings that leave some mystery, that are more impressionistic, so this style appeals to me. Other artists are very interested in hyper-realistic, ultra-detailed paintings, and that's fine. But if you align with my aesthetic preference, this might be something you think about too during that last phase of painting a scene. 

Ask yourself - does this shape resemble the subject I am representing? If the answer is yes, stop. This is a great way to hold back on some of those details that can make a painting look overworked.

You can always go back and add some detail, but you can't as easily take away detail. So, it might be that you restrain yourself, take a break from your painting, and decide to add a detail or two when you come back. Or you might come back and take a sigh of relief that you didn't go overboard with detail the previous day. 

Related Blogs 

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