A Way to Improve Your Watercolor Painting

My opinion is that painting watercolor is like playing the game of golf.

Just so you know, I am not a golfer, but I have known enough golfers and watched enough tournaments to know that you can never get too good at or be too satisfied with your game.

It's the same with watercolor. There is no such thing as perfection--it's unattainable. (Okay, with golf, I suppose if you could shoot an 18, that would be perfection, but c'mon, that will never happen.)

But that doesn't mean we painters should not try or stop trying to achieve the unattainable. That's the point of today's blog--keep improving.

One way to do that is practice, practice, practice. One way I have learned to do that is to select a subject (or object) to paint and paint it a lot. Paint it many times, over and over.

Like the proverbial 10,000 hours, you should be an expert after painting that many hours. Even with that, I'm not so sure about watercolor.

A good how-to book suggested this way to improve. A book I recently read, and now use as a reference, is Watercolor Workshop Handbook by Robert Wade. I think it's a very good resource.

Anyway, one suggestion, as I said, is to paint one thing many times. One way of doing this is to divide a sheet of watercolor paper into four equal sections using masking tape. You then paint one small painting in each section or four paintings on one sheet.

The size of the sheet isn't all that important, I suppose, but the smaller the sheet the more likely you are (or at least I was) to paint a lot of pictures without using up a lot of good watercolor paper.

Today's image is an example of a sheet of four paintings I did, this one of skies. I practiced painting many different kinds of skies from clear to cloudy to overcast including all types of clouds as well.

This won't guarantee perfection, but you will certainly learn a lot about how to paint one thing better than you did before, in my case, it was skies.

Keep On Painting