6 Steps to a Successful Watercolor Painting

I spent a lot of time painting this delicious array of juicy slices and I want to show you the process of planning I do when I paint!

BrainStorm

Reflecting time on your subject manner. I assess my reference and think in layers. Watercolor is all about layers of paint, light to dark, preserving your whites, etc. Start to think about your underpainting and the 1st layer you will lay down. Here is the reference photo I used for this project.

Color Swatch

I pull out my color swatches and pick out the colors I am going to use for my project, take into consideration if the colors are transparent or semi-opaque this is very important when it comes to glazing. I needed to make sure I used transparent yellows when it came to my lemons so that you can see through the different layers.

Here is a video I did on color swatching:

Plan your layers

Think about watercolor in layers, what is the first layer you are going to put down and build up from there. Remember it is better to layer things in steps and build up slowly to preserve the light areas than to paint heavy and try to get back your whites. In this step, you will also think about what techniques you will use to create texture in your artwork.

Practice Techniques

When it comes to textures I plan to use in my paintings I generally take a scrap piece of watercolor paper and try the technique out to make sure my ideas will work.

To mimic the texture of the citrus I made random squiggly lines varying my colors as I painted the different slices.

Great drawing

Before even starting this painting of course it all comes down to having a great guide to follow AKA your drawing. 75% of a good watercolor comes down to an excellent drawing. I have heard this time and time again and it is so true! If your drawing looks off to you it will not be fixed by paint! Adjust your proportions and make it look right. I suggest you do your drawing on regular paper first, you can erase all you want to get it just right. Unfortunately doing a draft on watercolor paper can be problematic if you are having a hard time getting proportions and needing to erase may harm the paper and skew your painting.

Trace with tracing paper your perfected drawing onto your watercolor paper and rest easy that your paper will be fresh and not damaged by the drawing.

If you are amazing at drawing and proportions and rarely erase then go for it straight off the start!