Here’s a couple of quick tips about doing art tutorials. One to make them relevant to you, and one to keep your attention if you feel the tutorial is progressing too slowly.

Art tutorials are always a good idea

I love doing art tutorials for sketching and watercolour. There are so many free and paid resources online there’s never a shortage of inspiration. I’m currently working my way through a beginners watercolour tutorial on Etchr. Even though I’m not technically a beginner, it’s always good to get a refresher of the basics.

There’s so many watercolour techniques to learn that some get forgotten or overlooked the first time around.

Quick Tip to make Art Tutorials Relevant

In the beginner’s watercolour tutorial the instructor used small squares to demo the techniques he covered. This is a standard practice for watercolour tutorials, but it’s not very inspiring for more advanced students like me. So instead of using boxes to practice the techniques, I used quick people sketches to practice them. This made the tutorial relevant to me, and was excellent practice for applying the techniques more interesting.

The tutorial featured a section about how to vary the amount of water in your brush before you pick up your paint. By making sure your brush is loaded with more water, you end up moving paint around your page rather than painting it onto the paper. The results created are less static and have a looser feel.

Up until this point, I though the best way to create a loose watercolour style was to paint wet on wet, which I don’t really like because of the fuzzy edges. But this pre-loaded-water on the brush creates the same loose look without losing the hard edges that I like prefer.

Quick Tip to make Art Tutorials Engaging

A lot of the tutorial covered techniques I was already confident about, but I didn’t want to fast-forward through the video incase I missed interesting snippets. So I increased the playback speed to 1.75 and listened out for tips that were relevant to my style of sketching and painting. Then I stop the video and reduce the playback speed so I can pay closer attention.

I love that you can play around with different speeds on video playbacks. Not only does it mean I don’t get bored by having to listen to content that isn’t relevant, but it also means it doesn’t take as long to get through a tutorial.

So if you’ve held back on doing more art tutorials, try applying the techniques to the subjects you love painting, and experiment with the playback speed.