Top Three Problems With Your Watercolor Paintings (And how to fix them)
Mar 09, 2022Being able to identify problems in your painting can be a real turning point on your painting journey. But this can take time, practice, and keen observation.
To start, when you are unable to pinpoint what went wrong in a painting, assess it on the most common issues. From here, you can focus on improving specific skills and see progress over time.
The Top 3 Problems in Watercolor Painting are:
1. Perspective and Drawing. Joseph Zbukvic calls drawing the skeleton of your painting. If your painting doesn't have good bones, it's just not going to work. But you don’t need to begin with a complete rendering of your scene before you start painting. Just create a road map.
You don't need to spend years becoming an expert draftsman in order to create accurate, beautiful, wonderful watercolor paintings. You just need to know enough about drawing to create a nice composition, to arrange the major parts of your painting in a pleasing way, and to ensure that your painting has accurate perspective.
One book that I have learned a lot from is Perspective Made Easy by Ernest Ralph Norling. It’s about a $10 book that has made a huge difference in my skill in this area.
2. Overworking Your Painting. I think this might be more of a struggle in watercolor than in other mediums because watercolor needs to be fresh. It needs to be clean and painted with confidence.
The first tip I have to help you avoid this common mistake is to take time to assess your scene before you start painting. Ask yourself a few questions, like, what details in this scene are important? What details can I eliminate? Then create a game plan to include what you think is most impactful.
My second tip is to make sure that you are using the right tools. Many times, I find that students are using too small of a brush. If you're painting a shape or an area in 20 brush strokes when it could be done in four brushstrokes, that leads to the painting being overworked. So switch your brushes when you need to, and select the right size brush for what you are painting.
And if you really want to dive deep into this issue, try my free tutorial on this exact topic. It is called How to Avoid Overworking Your Painting and you can find it here.
3. Inaccurate Values. This is the most common issue I see in students’ paintings - and in my own. Values are the greatest tool that we have to paint an effective, powerful scene, so it is what I recommend students focus on most.
Practicing value studies, learning to simplify all the different value ranges into three groups, and working on that middle value shape can go a long way to strengthening your painting.
I elaborate on these strategies in my course called Watercolor Essentials. In fact, I devote a whole module to it called Values Simplified: Demystifying the Most Powerful Tool in Painting. You can check this out here.
I hope that learning about the Top 3 Problems in Watercolor Painting helps you to see your finished paintings in a different light and gives you a better sense of what skills to focus on to improve.
Thank you for spending some time with me today! Keep working at it, keep moving forward in your painting, and I'll see you next time!