Watercolor: Inkwork

Wednesday, July 1, 2026

There's already been some inkwork strewn about in previous posts, but adding in a bit of black, white, or gold gel pen or marker can make a piece really pop.

Not to mention, just adding some doodle patterns into the middle of this color bleed practice:

Watercolor: Color Fill

Sunday, June 28, 2026

On the one hand, filling in the background on these floral pieces if very difficult to get even...but on the other hand, the water-y-ness of watercolor always comes out looking good, even when not even!

Filling in shapes evenly with color is an ongoing challenge. It'd be nice to be able to control that effect a little more.

Watercolor: Circles

Friday, June 26, 2026

You can create some pretty unique designs just by tracing circles. Spacing them out works nicely, but even just randomly overlapping them comes out quite well, imho.

Heck, just free-hand painting these pebble circles looks quite nice!

Watercolor: Walk-the-Dog + Mother Colors

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Walk-the-Dog is a technique where you just put semi-random pencil lines on the page...and then you watercolor within those created shapes. One of my favorite techniques is to add black ink lines, increasing in size at the corners, as the first one on this post.

But it's also nice to use these shapes as an opportunity to explore using different 'mother colors'. That is, mixing a bit of one pigment into all the others used on the page to make the colors more cohesive.

Watercolor: Water/Pigment/Alcohol Drops vs Wet-on-wet

Sunday, June 21, 2026

By just quickly mushing a bunch of colors together while everything is still wet you can get a pretty impressive little abstract waterolor painting, like those above.

...or you can try adding in drops of rubbing alcohol or water while the paint is still a bit wet, to see how that moves around the pigment.

And then there's the same technique, but dropping in pigment instead, and letting the watercolors mesh together on their own. Letting go of control, letting the pigments do their thing!

Watercolor: Willa Wanders Watercolor for Relaxation

Friday, June 19, 2026

I returned from The France trip needing to PAINT. Not that I'm particularly good at painting, but it turns out...watercolor is a fairly forgiveable, productive skill. So I started with Walla Wanders Watercolor for Relaxation Class and did a lesson or two per day.

The first several paint practices are playing around with water, salt, pigment. Just learning the medium.

With very minimal skill and time spent practicing, you can pretty quickly see some beautiful things be created!