If you haven’t already heard, I’m hosting a group event inside my popular Watercolour course. This will be a chance to work through the video lessons over 7 weeks with an inspiring cohort from around the world – starting this week, on Wednesday 14 May 2025.

When beginning to sketch with watercolour, it’s common to create sketches with murky washes, flat colours, and overworked areas. Can you relate to this?

The secret to producing lively watercolour washes is to gain a solid understanding of how pigment suspended in water behaves. This is the main theme of the course – to develop a few specific strategies for using watercolour quickly and spontaneously to make the most of its unique properties.

There is an emphasis on using watercolour for sketching (as opposed to more traditional watercolour paintings involving multiple layers of paint and waiting time in between each pass!) and creating simple sketches with lively washes with lots of pigment parties.

Over the years, I have added quite a lot of bonus material to the course, and so in this article, I thought it would be fun to share some of this and give an overview of the main concepts we cover.

How to control the water in our washes and know how to mix washes that are watery, juicy and pasty.

How to be aware of the wetness of the washes on our page and decide whether to work wet on dry or wet on wet.

How to get to know your paints – the different characteristics of each and how best to use them.

How to create simple sketches with lively washes and let the colours mix to create watercolour magic.

How different types of paper affect the results.The importance of combining watery and juicy washes in a sketch.

How to think through different options when sketching a landscape.

How to create simple landscape sketches without overworking.

How to see values (tones) and do value studies to create contrast. (Bonus: how to do Watery-Juice-Pasty (WJP) thumbnails as well!)

How to work from light to dark (after doing a value study.)

How to start with the darks and leave lots of white space – for simple subjects.

How to start with the darks and leave lots of white space – for more complex subjects.

How to start with the darks when doing landscapes (can you tell that this is a favourite technique of mine?)

How to capture the light – different colours for a sunny and overcast scene.

How to paint trees (and trees in the background)

The difference of mixing greys vs using paynes grey or neutral tint (and why I prefer the former!)

Understanding the difference between transparent and opaque pigments and how to prevent opaque pigments from becoming murky.

How to experiment with watercolour and have fun!

As you can see, this course covers many essential concepts and techniques – it contains everything I wish I’d known when I started sketching with watercolour!

If it’s a good fit for you, I would love to have you join this cohort!

Watercolour Group Self-Paced Version
starting 14 May 2025

Work through the lessons in 7 weeks
with an inspiring group of sketchers
 

Find out more about Watercolour
 
 
 
Buy Watercolour along with Foundations and Sketchbook Design – Sketch Your Life Bundle – and save!
 
 

If you have purchased the Watercolour course previously you have access to this Group Event for free! Simply visit the Watercolour course via My Courses and look for the big blue button!