Feature Image: My Mum’s Cottage Garden and box hedging

Tips for beginning watercolour painters who are overwhelmed by the technical side of watercolour painting.

There’s nothing more inviting and enticing then opening a brand new pallet of colors. That pristine clean paint box and all of those lovely watercolors wrapped in cellophane and paper labels and even with a set of just 12 watercolor paints the concept of mastering watercolor and untangling the logic on the impact of transparency, semi opaque and opaque, warm versus cold, granulating versus non-granulating. Can be really overwhelming.

It’s easy to get frozen before you use your paint brush to start your first image. So the best approach is to ignore all of those technical sides of watercolour. Grab a blank piece of paper. And start painting. The first thing you have to master is creating an image in the style that you want. This is going to take a while and there’s no better way to approach this than just getting stuck in with your paints.

It’s almost as if the advanced steps of watercolour is getting to grips with the impact of all of those other technical elements. Don’t let the technical side of watercolor paralyze you’re a creative endeavours. Just open the lid of your watercolours and start painting.

Now this is a case of do I do as I say not do as I did. Because what I did was get lost in lots of well-known painter’s websites trying to untangle the mysteries of my pallet. I got lost in learning the rules about mixing warm and cold colours together, and how to avoid muddy colours. And the challenge of understanding the impact of transparent versus opaque watercolour correctly. All of this became overwhelming and put me off the creative process.

So after my false-start I put all that research aside and started painting. It’s taken me about five months to get ready to embrace the technical side of watercolour.

Get Technical When you Plateau

What will happen is that your paintings will plateau. You’ll want to achieve depth of perspective to differentiate your background from your foreground but your paintings look flat and one dimensional. Or you’ll want to create more vibrant images and can’t understand why your colour combinations look muddy. Then you know it’s time to get technical. Or your images look like a rainbow threw up on your pictures and you know it’s time to start tackling the mystery behind primary and complimentary colours. But where on earth do you start?

I started focusing on specific subject elements I wanted to paint. I prefer painting people and I’ve got to a point where I don’t just want people on a page I want people in a scene like urban sketching or situational images for my travel paintings. So the background anchors the people to a specific time or place, who or where they are, or what they’re doing. I wanted my images to tell a story.

Limit your Technical Focus

I began by looking at one of the background elements I’d been struggling with—which is greenery foliage and trees. Up to this point I’d been using the premixed pure greens in my palate. But when I’m traveling I want to make sure I have a limited palette with me so I realize that one of the key elements I could focus on was combining two primary colors yellow and blue to create a variety of greens and that’s where this current journey is taking me.

By focusing on a specific topic (trees and greenery), and focusing on two colours and ignoring the other ten in the palette, it make the technical side of mastering my watercolours more manageable. It’s a great way to overcome that feeling of being overwhelmed.

You can’t rush the mastering of watercolour, it’s a very long journey and you’ll continually learn new skills, technique, and information that can transform a bland painting into something with a wow-factor. Bring on the WOW!

Look out for Part Two of this Article about tackling my greens.