How to Design a Watercolor Painting

Buy watercolor paints in solid, paste or pencil form.

Watercolors make for an inexpensive painting medium for beginners and experts alike, but they take more effort to control than other types of paint because of their liquid consistency on the page. To take full advantage of this medium, plan to execute your designs in phases, allowing layers of paint to dry before moving on to another phase. Watercolors lend themselves well to a free-flowing painting style, so don't worry about staying exactly inside the lines.

Things You'll Need

• Watercolor paints
• Oil pastels
• Paintbrushes
• Water jar
• Plastic palette
• Newsprint
• Pencil
• Eraser
• Watercolor paper/canvas
• Newspaper
• Plastic table cloth

Instructions

Deciding on a Subject

1. Decide on a subject. Whether you plan to paint on site or from preliminary sketches and photographs, this constitutes an important step in designing your watercolor.

2. Look at your subject from a number of possible focal points. You can emphasize a painting's focal point through location on the page, contrast and color, making it the first thing brought to the viewer's attention.

3. Eliminate unnecessary or confusing details from your composition to emphasize your focal point and to make your painting a more cohesive whole.

4. Change or omit any elements that you don't like or don't feel fits the image you want to convey.

5. Perform a few preliminary sketches of your painting on newsprint or other inexpensive paper; remember that elements should be balanced and visually connected.

6. Add more objects or a line to connect the main objects of the painting, but avoid connecting two elements with a vertical line. Don't draw a large object in the center, and then another off in the distance without any connecting element.

7. Apply horizontal lines to suggest calmness, stability and tranquility, vertical lines to give a feeling of balance, formality and alertness and oblique lines to suggest movement and action.

8. Repeat elements for a unifying effect, but remember to vary them to maintain visual interest in your painting.

Deciding on a Color Scheme

1. Practice some color combinations on your preliminary sketches with oil pastels. Use different combinations of cool and warm colors to express different moods and emphasize specific areas of your painting.

2. Apply compound and neutral watercolors to your painting and gradually add in pure tones in focal points. Using too many pure colors can make your painting inharmonious and noisy.

3. Vary tones from dark to light and shift colors between warm and cool shades to maintain visual interest.

4. Apply the watercolors such that your focal point the area of maximum contrast in a painting. The eye goes directly to the area of maximum contrast between light and dark.

5. Paint focal points with a purer tone of the colors used in the rest of the painting or use a contrasting color like a warm orange or red against a cool blue or gray background to attract attention.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't try to exactly reproduce preliminary sketches in the final painting. Watercolor is a very uncontrolled medium, and the best watercolors embrace this quality to some degree.

• Be sure to plan your white areas ahead of time: in watercolor painting, white spaces are unpainted areas. If you paint over the area, your white disappears.

• Use more water for lighter colors and less water for purer colors.

• Paint your background color washes first. After they dry, you can work on other large areas of color. Paint detailed areas last.

• Put down newspaper or an old plastic tablecloth and have paper towels handy to clean up any spills.

• Change water that looks muddy or murky for fresh.

• Clean your brushes between color changes for purer paint colors.

• Experiment and try out different techniques.

• Wear a paint shirt or an apron to protect your clothes.

• Protect your paintings. Watercolors are easily ruined by an overturned cup of water. Keep them in a safe, waterproof place.

• Frame your watercolors behind glass or plastic, or conserve them by coating them with a special wax.

• Wait for background and nearby washes to dry to create precise lines or small details.

• Avoid designing a painting with too much balance of symmetry; the overall effect may bore the viewer. A slight imbalance in your composition can create interest and draw attention to your focal point. That said, a totally unbalanced composition will create a sensation of discomfort.

References

• John Lovett: Watercolor and MixedMedia Artist: Elements and Principles of Design
• John Lovett: Watercolor and Mixed Media Artist: What to Include and What to Exclude
• John Lovett: Watercolor and Mixed Media Artist: Using Compound Colors
• John Lovett: Watercolor and Mixed Media Artist: Tonal Contrast Design Element

Resources

• John Lovett: Watercolor and MixedMedia Artist: Why Paint Watercolor
• John Lovett: Watercolor and MixedMedia Artist: Mixing Watercolor
• John Lovett: Watercolor and MixedMedia Artist: Watercolor Finishing, Varnishing and Preservation
• John Lovett: Watercolor and MixedMedia Artist: Tools and Materials
• John Lovett: Watercolor and MixedMedia Artist: Watercolor Technique