The subject of watercolor painting techniques is very vast and includes topics like deciding and mixing paints, use of color, glazing and lot many others. Here we’ll focus on brush control, an extremely critical feature of painting. Unless you master control of brush, you will not get the desired results. So, let’s closely look at this aspect of painting.

One technique you would surely like to master is the “Thick and thin” technique. Here, you keep varying the pressure that you are exerting on the brush while painting a straight line. As a result of varying pressure that you apply, the corresponding thickness of the line also changes from thick to thin to thick again and so on. It’s a very simple but very useful technique. Here are some more watercolor painting techniques.

How you attempt capturing certain things affects the ultimate painting. Suppose you were paining grass. In all probability you would apply small but sharp movements. This technique used here is called as “wrist flick”. You will need to spend time and effort learning it. While talking of grass, you would start from the base of the canvas, and move the brush upwards is such a way that blades of glass really seem to be upcoming from the ground. That way you get lifelike images on your canvas.

Another technique employed for watercolor painting is known as “Bands of color”. This is how you can make it work. Using any particular color, draw a curve on the canvas. Now, using a different color, draw another curve parallel to the earlier curve, just below it. It has to be drawn in such a manner that the two are too close to each other, yet the two colors shouldn’t get mixed up. Follow the same procedure for drawing a third and fourth curve and keep going in that fashion till you get an interesting pattern.

Techniques for watercolor painting are quite unique, yet funny at times, at least for a novice. Here is one such. You may get some very exclusive results by just spraying the paint using your brushes. Using your finger tap the brush at its end to spray the paint on your paper. You can have varying results by using different brushes. Like to try your toothbrush! Using paintbrushes of different sizes you may evenly splash paint on paper or cover it with droplets of varying sizes. It will be quite interesting to fist cover the surface with different sized papers in different shapes so that paint won’t cover those areas and then spray the rest of the sheet of paper with colors. You can also try varying the angle and height of brush while applying or spraying paint. Use your imagination and experiment with some of these tricks.

There is a long list of techniques employed for watercolor paining. Here is another important one that the reader will find useful.

So far we have been talking of the techniques of applying paints on paper. Now, we’ll see how to remove colors from paper that has used watercolors. Choose a segment of the painted surface and look around for an appropriate tool for removing part of it by scratching the surface. The ideal tool for the purpose is a penknife. These days you also get brushes that have an inbuilt notch that does the job very well. The ultimate results depend upon the kind of tools used. Be imaginative and think of small useful tools that could be exploited for the purpose. Perhaps a kitchen knife would solve the purpose. Or may be you could use your credit card or even a small thick needle would do the trick!