Watercolor Fast and Loose

This is one of the more difficult mediums to use with many beginning artists giving up almost after their first try!

With watercolor, you must plan your painting first; you cannot erase your mistakes with white opaque paint. So you paint the correct colors (in value and hue) first. If you try to paint over an area again, it will look a mess. This takes practice—a lot of practice.

Watercolor paintings must look fresh and spontaneous, not muddy and overworked. My advice is to start with a LARGE brush about 1 inch wide, preferably a Purdy from Home Depot as they are a lot cheaper than the art store brushes.

Get a fair amount of paint (say blue for the sky) and mix it with water so your brush is loaded with paint. Before you put paint to paper, wet the watercolor paper with a damp sponge, then take your loaded brush and make a sweeping stroke at the top from left to right (if you are right-handed) and run your brush down the paper as you blend it into the white areas with more water on your brush.

In one or two attempts at this you should have a nice even and blended blue background from your dark blue color at the top fading into a white (your white paper) at the bottom. You work fast and loose with NO fiddling.