Here's the Key to Watercolor Timing - Watercolor Timing Practice
Jul 06, 2026So much of our success in watercolor comes down to watercolor timing and water-to-paint ratio.
Today, I have a fantastic practice to help you hone these very important skills. You can use this practice with any subject matter, whether you are a beginner, an intermediate, or a more experienced painter.
A Watercolor Timing Study
I'm confident that this practice will help you.
It takes a lot of mental effort to paint watercolor because it's so dependent on timing, on how wet your paper is the moment that you touch your brush to the paper, and also how much paint and water is loaded into your brush. These are things that can be kind of elusive to study and to learn. As I've practiced this more and more through my years of painting, though, I found one particular practice very helpful in honing these crucial skills, and that's what we're going to work on today.
This is a watercolor timing study. Let me show you what it looks like. You may remember a few weeks back, I talked about this mountain painting and how important timing was to create soft edges for the mountains in the distance.
Well, the way I was able to work out my approach to that painting was by doing a timing study.
In this practice, we're going to take color mixing and set that aside. This is a simple way to approach your scenes using only one color.
Drawing
Light Values
Middle Values
Dark Values
Watch My Video for a Comprehensive Look at This Process
In this week's video, I walk you through my whole process. Check it out here.
Related Blogs
See Your Watercolor Scene With Clarity - One Simple Tip
