How to Simplify Your Watercolor Paintings - Three Steps

There is a temptation when you're painting a scene to include everything that's in your reference photo or everything that's in front of you. But today we're going to talk about how choosing what not to include makes for a stronger painting.  

The reason simplification is so important is that it helps clarify your message to the viewer. Simplifying makes your scene less confusing and emphasizes what you think is most valuable in the scene. 

So today, I'm going to give you three things you can do to simplify your scene: 

• Look for the big shapes in the scene. You are essentially creating a collection of shapes when you paint. If you can stop thinking of objects for what they are and start to think of them more as shapes, this will help you. Look at your shapes, remove the labels you give them like ‘tree’ or ‘car’ and just compare them to one another. This will help you draw more accurately. 

Some methods to see big shapes more clearly is to squint or to turn your reference photo black and white. Anything you can do to minimize detail, look for the big shapes, and find value connections is very helpful. 

• Simplify the background. It’s so easy to get consumed with everything that's in the background of your scene. You want to include all those small little details, but what they often end up doing is detracted from the focal areas of your painting. 

Some methods to simplify your background are: cool down and desaturate your distance, push elements back with soft edges, and use less contrast in the background. By doing these things, you are creating distance in your background and letting your audience know that the important things are in the middle ground and in the foreground.

• Create a focal area. It's okay to have multiple areas of interest around your painting, but it is helpful to have an area that has a little more interest than other areas. So you're saving your highest contrast, your most saturation, and your dramatic shifts in color for this important area of your painting. 

A method to create this focal area involves simplifying and abstracting other areas of your painting while adding a little more detail in your focal areas. 

Simplification is such a wonderful tool that we have. When you start to understand what's important to paint and what is not important to paint, your paintings become a lot stronger. 

I also wanted to mention that if you haven't checked out my free video lesson, How to Avoid Overworking Your Painting, take a look at it!

https://www.learntopaintwatercolor.com/opt-in

In this lesson I talk through eight different tips to help you avoid overworking your painting. I have received a lot of positive feedback on this, and I hope it can help you out as well. 

Thank you guys for spending some time with me today. I hope that you found this video helpful, and I will see you next time.

-Matt