Watercolor painting involves various techniques that leverage the medium's transparency, fluidity, and its relationship with water and paper. These methods affect how the final piece looks, its texture, and its depth. Watercolour stands out because of the variety of strokes it can create and the different ways you can play with dry and wet paint to achieve a wide range of effects through paint application. For instance, if you apply it to damp paper or on top of a wet wash, you'll get beautiful flowing colors with soft, cloud-like edges, or tidelines, as it dries.
Wash
is the term for when diluted pigment is spread evenly over the paper. Washes can be flat, giving a consistent colour, or graded, smoothly shifting from darker to lighter shades. They're commonly used to create backgrounds, skies, or large colour areas.
Artists often differentiate between wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques. In wet-on-wet painting, pigment is placed on damp or wet paper, letting colours blend and spread gently, which can also lighten a strong colour. This method is typically linked to atmospheric effects and more fluid shapes. On the other hand, wet-on-dry painting means applying pigment to dry paper, leading to sharper edges and more control, making it ideal for intricate details.
Layering, often referred to as glazing, is a key technique in painting. It involves applying see-through layers of color over dried paint to enhance depth, alter colors, or add shadows. Since watercolor is transparent, the layers beneath stay visible and play a role in the overall color effect.
There are other techniques that help add texture and visual appeal. The dry brush technique uses a brush with very little water to create rough, uneven marks that highlight the texture of the paper. Lifting is another method where pigment is removed from either damp or dry paper using a brush, sponge, or cloth to create highlights or make corrections. Additionally, artists might use masking, which temporarily covers certain areas to keep the paper white while painting the surrounding sections.
Watercolour paint works for both realist painting and more impressionist styles too, though it demands a different kind of discipline than oils or acrylics. Because it is a transparent medium, you are essentially "painting with light" as the white of the paper reflects through the layers of pigment.
The image of J .M. W. Turner's, Scarborough, c.1825, (left), displays the luminous, glowy realism of watercolours that feels more organic and breathable than the heavy texture of acrylics. While many associate watercolour with "blurry" washes, it is capable of extreme precision and was historically a favorite for botanical illustrations, see John James Audubon's Tricolored Heron, 1832 (right).
Watercolour is arguably the best medium for abstraction because of its unpredictability. It behaves like a living thing when it hits wet paper. Watercolour and art styles such as Impressionism are a natural match because they share a core philosophy: capturing the fleeting quality of light and atmosphere rather than rigid, permanent details. See below the impressionist work of Berthe Morisot, In the Woods, 1876, and the modernist work of John Marin Brooklyn Bridge, ca. 1912 — both painted in watercolour.