Simple and Stunning Watercolor Techniques

Expand your repertoire of advanced watercolor painting techniques to infuse your work with interest and excitement alongside artist and instructor Mary Murphy.

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Lessons

01: Underpainting
Meet Mary Murphy, your guide to simple and stunning watercolor techniques. In this first lesson, Mary introduces the underpainting, the base of any good watercolor. She demonstrates a few masking techniques and shows how complementary colors help balance a painting and create surprising effects.
19 min

02: Size & Composition
Why you’re painting is often just as important as what you’re painting. Mary looks at the intention behind each work as a way of highlighting how to plan size and composition using thumbnails and sketches. She also offers a tip for scaling and paints a miniature square floral.
21 min

03: Creating Texture
Mary will show you how to use a variety of household materials, from credit cards to table salt, to add texture and visual interest to your watercolors. Then she paints a scene near her home to put those principles into practice.
23 min

04: Exploring Water Media
Learn how to complement your watercolors with other mediums. Mary introduces gouache and acrylic, which offers the exciting option of subtractive painting. Then she shows how watercolor grounds can help provide even more texture before combining all elements into one of her works.
14 min

05: Brushes & Paper
The tools you use determine so much about what your painting will look like. Mary introduces a variety of brush types and techniques, from scumbling with a mop quill to writing with a rigger. Then she shows how paper weight and texture can give your final product unique effects.
27 min

06: Pigments
No two watercolors are created equally. Mary walks through what makes some pigments transparent while others are opaque. She also introduces the concept of granularity, which helps produce more life-like skin along with skies and clouds, before finishing with a primer on staining pigments.
18 min

07: Rescuing Techniques
Painting in watercolor means always having a chance to correct mistakes. Mary takes a painting she’d abandoned long ago and attempts to recover it in real time. In the process, she shows how to critique, introduces rescuing techniques and teaches how to check for value.
29 min