How to Design a Watercolor Painting

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.

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.