Watercolour Techniques: The Importance of Practice

If you’ve reached the watercolour techniques section of the course, you’ll know that you’re expected to produce a series of exercises demonstrating the fundamental watercolour methods. Some of these approaches may already feel familiar, while others might be completely new. Even the techniques you already know often need to be adapted for botanical work, which demands far more control and subtlety than looser watercolour styles.

Whatever your starting point, you will almost certainly need to expand your range of techniques for botanical painting. This takes time, repetition, and a willingness to experiment. The exercises are designed to help you build that foundation -understanding how water behaves, how pigment settles, and how different surfaces respond.

Botanical watercolour is a craft of precision, and developing that level of control is absolutely achievable with steady, focused practice.

Examples of how different techniques are used in the first layers: Top row, Grading colour from light to dark and vice versa. Middle Row: Blending, two colours. Bottom row: Wet-in-wet using two or more colours on to a wet or damp surface allows controlled merging of colour. These techniques are usually the starting point with a subject and create the base to work on. Dry brush techniques can used to build colour saturation and detail in subsequent layers, so don't go in too heavy in the early stages. Practicing the techniques on a regular basis in your sketchbook or on scraps of paper - will pay off and will allow you to document your progress.

Additional Tutorials Added

You will find a range of exercises and supporting videos for both wet and dry techniques in the course materials on the website. Additional resources to support your learning have also been added, with tutorials on Watercolour Techniques and Dry Brush Techniques, and also Colour Mixing. These tutorials are meant to reinforce some of the course information.

Gaining Control of Water and Paint

The first point I want to emphasise is that the purpose of these watercolour exercises is to help you think consciously about how much water and paint you’re using, and to understand the differences between wet and dry techniques. Watercolour offers a wide range of approaches -painting onto wet, damp, or dry paper; layering washes; and several forms of dry brush work - it can feel a little overwhelming at first.

In botanical painting, control over the water is essential, and generally far less water is used than in looser, expressive watercolour styles. Typically, only the first layers are relatively wet. The smaller the subject, the less water you’ll need - otherwise the edges will flood or bloom, and you’ll lose control of the form. The most common issue I see at this stage is simply using too much water.

Don’t Aim for Perfection at This Stage

The second point worth stressing is that your watercolour exercises are not expected to be perfect. Don’t spend too long trying to refine them before submitting your assignment. Perfection isn’t the goal right now. I'm more interested to see your approach and how you adapt it to achieve the desired outcome.

What is important is that you begin to:

1. Recognise the differences between wet and dry approaches

2. Understand how water quantity affects edges, texture, and colour

3. Notice when and why you need to adjust your technique for each subject

4. This stage is about building awareness, not producing polished paintings.

Small, Regular Practice Makes a Big Difference

Regular practice outside the set exercises will help enormously. Even 15 minutes a day spent on small swatches, grading and blending, dry-brush or simply drawing with your brush, all of which will strengthen your control and confidence with the medium. Good watercolour technique is build it through repetition and observation, it takes a little time and quite a bit of patience.

A Few Examples of Practice Exercises

Below are a few practice pages produced as demos in classes or in my sketchbooks.

A sketchbook page experimenting with the different techniques, graded, blended, wet in wet, wet on dry for a hard edge, wet into damp for soft edge blending, glazing or overlaying two colours to create a third colour and also lifting and softening colour, which I try to avoid unless absolutely necessary, but its good to know which colours are easy to life and which are staining and won't budge!

Grading practice on a subject, this is a common technique used for the first layer. I generally dampen the paper rather than having it too wet. Water shouldn't be pooling on the surface and the paper can be dampened a couple of times, which allows more time and facilitates control of the medium. Whereas working onto paper that's too wet can lead to migration of pigment to the edge or loss of control. Note that light direction is from the upper left -hand side, get into the habit of using light direction too.

An example of painting into wet, which is appropriate for the blended colours in an autumnal oak leaf. Whereas, in the flower, the surface was dampened, to apply small areas of light colour - this makes it much easier to maintain the highlights and to create form. both create the foundation for adding detail and dry brush wok, which I have already started on the flower centre

Practicing dry brush techniques in a sketchbook. Includes: hatching, modelling, sweeping, drawing, stippling and scumbling - all have been painted on top of a dry flat wash.

More dry brush practice

Above is a demo sheet from one of my classes, and painting egg shapes is excellent practice. First and underlying graded or blended wash is used, then dry brush, either with modelling or with fine small hatching strokes. On the left I show the wrong way of beginning with loss of highlight and too much paint in the first layer and also versions that are too wet, both approaches have resulted hard or ragged edges and the 'egg' shape has lost it's symmetry as paint runs over the outline. On the right the correct way, with the softer edge, the base layer is lightly painted into damp and colour build on top with dry brush. I also demonstrate the benefit of the soft edge when creating separation between two overlapping eggs. Light direction from upper right-hand side.

Drawing with your brush: Think of this as expanding on the initial practice sheet with pencil, and see if you can do something similar with a small brush - this will be invaluable. The brush needs to have a good point and not be too small , e.g. a size 2 brush, otherwise it won't hold sufficient paint and you will need to stop too often, this makes an untidy line. Drawing with a brush is an incredibly important skill for a botanical artists, clean lines and small drawing of detail is used in most subjects, sometimes a pale outline is drawing first, and this outline blends into the colour applied later (just like you did with continuous tone with pencil). You will need to master long curving strokes, fine neat lines, small shapes and strokes and hatch lines. Try to make increasingly fine lines and paint overlapping parts that show you know when to stop. Draw a pencil line in first and see if you can follow it with your brush, and, see if you can write your name with your brush!. When painting long strokes, take a deep breath and hold it. Use the motion of the elbow and and arm for long strokes and the hand and fingers for short strokes.... just like drawing with graphite.

You move on to painting small subjects, such as sections of different stems, petals and fruits etc. the more you can do the sooner you will progress.

Practicing different stems using a variety of techniques. Rounded, flattened, shiny, ridged, matt , hairy, narrow and stems with markings. Light from the left hand side on this sheet.

Small subject practice: A range of techniques are used in all of these subjects, but it is the dry brush and detail that keeps the colours bright and creates the sharpness needed for botanical subjects. Conversely, if you work with too many wet layers, the colour becomes diffused as it sinks deep into the paper, which dulls it and the veins and edges with not be fine enough.

Please comment if you would like to know more about paarticular techniques. Remember to use the watercolour resources on the website, and dont just work from the printed materiasl , there are lots of videos demonstrating the techniques.