Watercolour Tips For Beginners (What I Learnt This Week)

Hello Everyone,

I hope your week has gone well.  This week I want to share my watercolour tips for beginners from what I have learnt this week.

Last weekend I had some young family members over and this led me to delving out all my art supplies old and new.  I found some watercolour palettes from my college/uni days and they were barely used! And they were over 20 years old!!

I pulled them out and decided to see if they were still ok and to have a go with them which I did. 

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed using them and gave me my first insight into what not to do.  So I created my own tips for beginners that I thought I would share with you as I pretty much did all the mistakes in this picture.

Watercolour Tips For Beginners

• Keep your sketching lines light or they will show through in your painting.
• Use watercolour paper - using the right paper makes all the difference as it can absorb and stand the water.  In the picture above I used standard sketchbook paper and it wrinkled a bit and the paint streaks a lot.
• Use wet on wet for large areas - this means to wet the paper first then apply the colour but do it gently just a little bit of water.  Use this for areas like skin that have a large surface area on the paper.
• Build up hour picture in layers - you can’t just do everything at once on a watercolour painting, you need to build up in layers and let each layer dry before applying the next or the paint/details will just bleed into one another and you will use definition.
• Use wet on dry for details - this means to use the wet paint on dry paper especially when doing finer details that you want to pop on your paining e.g. hair detail on a portrait or lips or eyes.

Those are my top tips that I have found out the hard way this week whilst playing with watercolours.  But most of all you need to be patient and take your time to build up your painting.

I hope these tips helped and to see my work for this week see my instagram page @zoebadgerart. Have a play and let me know how you got on in the comments section.

Until next week happy sketching.

Zoë