Painting a Watercolor –
From Start to Finish

This lesson will take you through the process of how to paint a watercolor painting. We will start with a drawing of leaves, transfer the drawing, do a wet-in-wet underpainting, paint the leaves, paint the background, and finish by putting in some
details and darks to create drama.

SUPPLIES

Watercolor is a drawing based medium so start with a pencil drawing. You can draw directly on your paper, but only use a KNEADED ERASER to make any corrections. Other erasers will damage the surface of the paper.

A drawing of maple leaves for you to use for this lesson is on page 3 of the attached PDF. The drawing fits on about an 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper. Transfer my drawing or draw your own leaves. Use only the three primary colors you are already familiar with for this painting:
• Cobalt Blue
• Winsor Red, Naphthol Red or Pyrrol Red
• Cadmium Yellow or Cadmium Lemon

STEP 1 – Transferring a Drawing

I almost always do my drawing on a piece of sketch paper and then transfer the drawing. When you have finished your drawing, take a soft 7B or 8B pencil and cover the back of the drawing with pencil graphite. Tape your drawing on one edge to the watercolor paper. Redraw it and lift up the drawing to check how much has transferred. The taped edge will keep the drawing from moving.

Make sure your transfer is not too light or too dark. Too light and the watercolor paint will cover it. Too dark and the pencil marks will show up in your final painting. It is sometimes hard to get the pencil marks under the paint to erase.

STEP 2 – Underpainting

Decide what color you want your leaves to be. Are they summer green leaves or will you be painting fall color? My painting is of fall leaves so my underpainting will be with my yellow and red paint with a little blue in background areas. If you are painting green leaves, which colors will you choose?

Cover your entire sheet of paper with water using a flat brush or spray bottle. Mix up your paints using a lot of water. Loosely cover the entire surface of the paper letting the paint flow and blend. Start to plan your composition by where you place the color. Have fun!

STEP 2 – Painting the Foreground Leaves

Let the surface of the paper dry a little. You can use a hair dryer to help. Then mix darker variations of your leaf colors and start to define the shapes of the leaves. You may find that the paint runs outside of the edges. Don’t worry if that happens. But to avoid it, make sure the paper is drier or mix less water into your pigment. Experiment. Try to make each leaf different from the one next to it.

STEP 3 – Painting the Background

This painting has a foreground and a background. The leaves are the foreground and around the leaves is the background. For my background, I will use the blue to mix grayer and darker colors that allow the brighter foreground leaves to stand out.

Use all three paints for the grayed background color. Start with blue, add a little red, then maybe a tiny touch of yellow to get a gray. Paint around the leaves, but you don’t have to be too careful.

STEP 4 – Making Adjustments

When the paint has dried, step back and look at your painting. The painting is at the awkward adolescent stage and you may think that now is a good time to throw it away. But hang in there, it needs adjustments. Let the painting tell you where it needs some brighter color, more detail, and darker color in the background. Ask yourself how you can make the painting more interesting?

STEP 5 – Finishing Touches

OK, it is almost there. What you need are a few final touches including shadows on the leaves, add the stem and veins of the leaves and punch in some darks. Paint cast shadows by loading your brush with dark paint, use the tip to paint along the edge of the leaf and then with a clean, damp brush, blend the edge of the shadow.

Look at your painting one more time and if it’s done, sign it. Voila!

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THE NEXT POST WILL ANALYZE ONE OF MY PAINTINGS.

Basic Watercolor Techniques – Part 2

In Art Posts #1 and #2, we experimented with adding different amount of water to the pigments and learning that paint flows in wet areas, but not into dry areas. Here are a few more watercolor techniques for you to experiment with. Art Post #4 will teach how to paint a complete painting.

FLAT WASH

The most basic watercolor technique is the flat wash and can be used as an underpainting for more layers or over dry painted areas to adjust colors or values. When thin paint is painted over dry paint to darken and adjust colors, it is called glazing.

The most important thing about planning a flat wash is to have enough paint. So mix up a large batch of paint on your palette. If you have a really large piece of paper, mix up your paint in a cup or bowl. The worst problem you can run into is to run out of paint while you are painting your flat wash. Don’t worry about wasting paint!

Experiment:

1. For a flat wash you can either work on dry paper or prewet the paper until you have a matt surface.
2. Use a large flat wash brush and load it with the paint. Start at the top of the paper and paint a broad stroke across the paper.
3. Tilt the paper so that the wet paint pools at the bottom of the brush stroke, load your brush, and paint the next stroke catching the bottom edge of the first stroke.
4. Continue to the bottom of the paper and when you are done, lay the paper flat to dry.

GRADED WASH

A graded wash is painted the same way that you paint the flat wash. But instead of loading your brush with more paint, add water to your brush to dilute the paint as you work towards the bottom of the paper. How much water to add does take some practice, so don’t be discouraged. You can always layer another graded wash over the first one if you have to. Just make sure that the paint is completely dry and that could take up to twenty-four hours. Watercolor painting is not always fast, fast, fast!

Experiment:

1. For a graded wash, it is often easier to work on prewet paper with a matt surface.
2. Use a large flat wash brush and load it with the paint. Paint a large brush stroke across the top of the paper.
3. Tilt the paper so that the wet paint pools at the bottom of the brush stroke.
4. Dip your brush in your water, but be carefull about adding too much water. Now paint the next stroke catching the bottom edge of the first stroke.
5. Continue painting to the bottom of the paper, adding more water with each stroke. When you are done, lay the paper flat to dry.

GLAZING

Glazing is a technique used in all the painting media: oil, acrylic, and watercolor. To glaze, you paint very thin layers of paint over paint that has dried to adjust colors and values. One of my favorite watercolor painters glazes over 100 layers of paint to get subtle atmospheric effects. And yes, this means it takes months to complete a painting. But you must make sure that the paint underneath is completely dry and for watercolors that may take 24 hours. Oil paint can take days to dry for glazing!

In order to glaze your watercolor, first check to see if your paper is dry by touching it. If it is cold that means the paper is still damp and your glaze may pick up the paint that is already on the paper. You can dry it with a hair dryer, but be patient and make sure the paint is really dry and not just warm from the hair dryer. Often you will have to let the paper dry overnight for the best effects. Paint the glaze very quickly and it should not disturb the paint underneath. But if you overwork it, you may lift up the bottom layer of paint!

PAINTING DARKS

The last thing you need to do when finishing a painting is to add your darkest darks. The darks will create drama in your work. If your paper is dry, you will have the most control and your paint will stay where you put it. Plus any brushstrokes will have nice crisp edges. In order to make your darks, you will need sticky paint and paints with strong pigments. Here are three examples using the three colors that we have been working with. The top one is a cool dark mixing blue and red, with the blue dominant. The middle color is a warm dark with the red dominant. The bottom uses all three pigments, but only a touch of the yellow. That will create a grayed, neutral dark.

DRYBRUSH

Dry brush is a method of creating texture in a painting. For example, it can be used to create moss texture on rocks or to mimic wood grain. When the paper is dry, mix up sticky or creamy paint. Dry your brush on a paper towel or a cloth and then load it with paint. Split the bristles apart, hold the brush at an acute angle to the surface of the paper, and pull it lightly across the top of the paper so that the paint catches on the top of the paper texture. You may have to experiment with the feel of this technique. I practice on a piece of scrap paper before I add the texture to a painting. Experiment with different brushes and on different papers.

IN THE NEXT LESSON WE WILL DO A PAINTING FROM START TO FINISH.

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Basic Watercolor Techniques – Part 1

Now that you have experimented with paint/water/paper (Art Post #1), and have learned about sticky paint, creamy paint, and thin paint, here are a few more techniques. Have fun and experiment with your paints. Don’t worry about creating a finished painting. We will explore that in another post.

USING WET & DRY AREAS

One of the easiest ways to control your watercolor paints is to control where you put your water. I have seen beginning students take a spray bottle and wet their whole paper. And then they find that their paint does what it wants, not what they want. The solution is to carefully wet ONLY the section that you want to paint. The paint will only flow where the paper is wet, but not into the dry area of the paper. This is tricky because we often want to paint in an area that is next to a wet or still damp area. Be patient and make sure that any adjoining areas are almost dry. You can tell if they are still damp by touching the paper. If it is cold, it is still damp and paint may bleed into that part of the paper.

In the small painting below, notice how the stems, leaves, and flowers all have clean, hard edges. Before adding the color, those areas were wet with clear water. The paint only flowed into those wet areas and bleeding of the colors only occurred in the wet areas.

Experiment:

Take a brush and using only clear water, paint an abstract shape on your paper. Make sure that you leave big dry holes in your shape and make sure that the wet areas have lots of water. Now on your palette, activate three colors with water and mix up some sticky paint, some creamy paint, and some thin paint for each color. Load your brush and drop the different paints into the very wet areas of your shape. You can tilt your paper so that your paint moves around the wet shape.
In the example shown, I put in the thin paint on the left side, then the creamy paint in the middle, and the sticky paint on the right. Notice how the wet paint bleeds more than the stickier drier paint. This is how to control your watercolors.

I used just three primary colors for this exercise:
• Cobalt Blue
• Winsor Red, Naphthol Red or Pyrrol Red
• Cadmium Yellow or Cadmium Lemon

MIXING PAINT ON THE PALETTE vs. LETTING IT MIX ON PAPER

The true beauty of painting with watercolor is that the colors are luminous, they glow. But this happens only when you “mix” your colors on your paper, instead of on your palette. Mixing colors on the palette can result in dull, muddy colors. But if you use the same pigments and drop them into a wet area, the colors will glow. This luminosity is one of the qualities of watercolor paintings and it is incredibly difficult to achieve it in oil or acrylic.

Experiment:

On your palette, activate the three primary colors and let them
flow into each other. Notice the many different colors that just
happen by the paints flowing into each other. By dipping your
brush into different sections of the paint puddle you get
different colors. Paint little squares of each color to see
how many different colors you can get.

Experiment:

1. Start by drawing two 2” squares. You will be comparing two color samples.
2. For your first sample, take your three colors and mix them all together on your palette until you get a brown.
3. Paint a square on your paper.
4. For your second sample, wet a square on your paper with clear water and then “mix” your three colors by dropping them into the wet area.
5. Letting the three paints mix naturally in the wet area will give you a richer color. To get a brown control how much of each color you put in. But notice how the pigments separate out and the brown square glows rather than looking muddy. Watercolor pigments create a pointillist effect.

BASIC COLOR THEORY!! Believe it or not, for this painting, I only used three paints, the three primaries that I recommend for these exercises­—yellow, red, and blue. The secondary colors—green, orange, and purple—are the mixes of the three primaries. Notice how many different colors
and variations I can get with just three paints.

N THE NEXT LESSON YOU WILL LEARN A FEW MORE WATERCOLOR TECHNIQUES.

To print a PDF of this lesson, select the download button below.