Watercolor Painting Tips for Beginners | Jerry's Artarama (2024)

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Watercolor Painting Tips for Beginners | Jerry's Artarama? ›

Summing Up Watercolor Tips For Beginners

Limit your palette to maintain color harmony. Don't allow foreign colors to cause distraction - link them to the rest of the painting. Consider using a tie up color to give the painting unity. Make your dark colors either warm or cool to avoid neutral dead spots.

Summing Up Watercolor Tips For Beginners

Limit your palette to maintain color harmony. Don't allow foreign colors to cause distraction - link them to the rest of the painting. Consider using a tie up color to give the painting unity. Make your dark colors either warm or cool to avoid neutral dead spots.

First, swirl your brush in some clean water and mix it on your paint palette to get the paint wet. Then use your brush to spread the paint mixture on your watercolour paper. Add more paint as you need, and you're done! Watercolour paints are activated by water so you can spread them on the paper.

In watercolors, painting light to dark is the most commonly accepted way to build up a painting. In other words, you start by applying layers of light toned, diluted paint, and gradually darken the painting with subsequent layers of color.

There are two fundamental techniques in watercolor painting. You can't escape them… they are: Wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. Together, these techniques form a golden rule that is unique to watercolors, and highlights the broad range of possibilities in watercolor painting.

There are 2 basic watercolor techniques that will be fundamental to your practice—wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. In this tutorial, I cover what these terms mean, when to use each of the two techniques, and how to do it successfully.

Should you wet watercolor paper before you begin painting? The watercolor paper only needs to be moistened prior to painting if you intend to use a wet-on-wet painting technique. Wetting the paper can lead to buckling, making brushstrokes challenging to control because of the resulting bumpy surface.

Before you start painting you need to mix some paint. Choose any color you like. Begin by getting your brush nice and wet so that it soaks up plenty of liquid. Then load it with water and press it against you mixing palette to release a puddle of water.

The benefit to painting the background wash first is that you are less likely to mess up the foreground object. For instance, if you were to carefully paint in the subject first (say, a red rose) and then paint in the background, you would risk getting the background paint on the rose, which might mess it up.

For me, I paint the first layer of my subject first then paint the background, then go back to my subject then finalize my background, then add final details on the subject.

Do you draw a picture before watercolor? ›

An underdrawing is the preparatory drawing on your watercolor paper that begins the painting process. This initial drawing places your subject on the page and defines where all the elements of the painting are going to be.

The student range is a good watercolour paint for beginners, though some people prefer to start straight away with professional-grade paints. Remember that the paints you use are down to personal preference. I see many people recommending that watercolour beginners buy good supplies, and the reason makes sense.