Watercolor Tutorial: Basic Exercises to Inspire Your Painting

Learn the watercolor basics: transparency and opacity, gradients, water use, pulse and precision with Cristina Cilloniz

Despite being one of the most popular visual arts, getting the most out of watercolor requires a lot of technical skill. As we can't use the colour white to create light, we must introduce the colors gently and work with transparency, or we will never achieve the effects we're looking for in our illustrations.

In this tutorial, botanical illustrator and artist Cristina Cilloniz (@cristina_cilloniz) shares her different techniques for letting go and taking advantage of watercolor's gentle layers. Get your materials ready and let's go.

Watch the tutorial in the video below:

1. Transparency and opacity exercise

Our first exercise consists of painting the inside of several vignettes drawn before on a piece of cardboard, using the same pigment in different proportions of water and color. This way, we get used to working without rushing and learn to master the first layers of our work.

To start, we'll mix a lot of water with little pigment. We will wet the pencil and start to paint our first vignette gradually with horizontal brushstrokes.

By starting in the upper part, we can see how our brush releases the excess water in the low part. To fix this, we will take pigment for our subsequent strokes from that upper part, slowly making the first stroke lighter and lighter. Once finished, we can remove any final excess by using a dry paintbrush in the affected areas to absorb it.

When we have finished our most translucent layer, we will add more pigment to the mix. With this new colour we will paint our next vignette. Each vignette should be painted with a more opaque color than the previous one so we can see the difference.

2. Gradient exercise

For the next exercise, we will see how to use gradients. Ideally, we'll use colors that follow each other in the color wheel , green and yellow, for example. If not, the mix may come out "muddy".

Lifting the card a bit, we will start to paint horizontally with one of our chosen colors as we did previously. At a certain point, we will begin adding the other color. We'll simply wet the tip we are using for the first color in the next and continue adding more strokes to the vignette.

Bit by bit, we'll add more pigment to the second color until it creates the gradient we are looking for. Once we finish the first vignette, we will remove the excess water as we did before.

You can repeat the process using blue and green or yellow and blue.

3. Botanical shapes exercises and water use

Now, we'll practice with botanical shapes. To do so, we shall draw the shape of leaves with a pencil with a wine pencil so we can add more detail.

First, we'll place some pigment in the area we want to stand out most to allow the color to accumulate there. From there, with the brush wet with clean water, we will drag the pigment gradually over the rest of the page. That way, we'll create a gradient going from dark to light, giving volume and shape to our illustration.

It's worth remembering that, as we work with watercolour in layers, we should always start with a thin layer. If we don't, it is far more difficult to correct or modify colors later on.

On another page, we will try to make a gradient in the first layer. We will start the same way: choosing a color, yellow, for example, and painting it on one side of the leaf, dragging the pigment across with clean water. On the other side, we will do the same with another color. We'll then use water to gradually bring the tones together, always leaving blank spaces of light in the centre.

Now, we can start to add the second layer to our two leaves using the same process: accentuating the areas we want to stick out most.

There are various ways to add the veins of the leaf. If we want them to be clearer than the leaf, we can use a thing brush to apply color with the same technique, applying color to the more central areas while leaving space in the middle.

If we want the veins to be darker, we can add an incomplete line of pigment in the centre of the leaf, dragging the color outward until it covers the whole leaf.

4. Pulse and precision exercise

The angle we hold our brush also affects our paintings. That's why, for this final exercise, we will adjust our angle in various ways: inclining it for thick lines and using it vertically for thin lines. This will get us used to our own materials, a useful tool in watercolour.

Now we've got the basics. It's time to put them to practice.

If you liked this tutorial, you can learn more from Cristina Cilloniz about creating botanical paintings filled with life and her favourite technique for painting depth on her online course Negative Watercolor Painting for Botanical Illustration.

You may also be interested in:

- Botanical Illustration with Watercolors, a course by Paulina Maciel · Canela
- Botanic Animal House: Watercolour, Ink and Graphite, a course by Violeta Hernández
- Botanical Painting with Acrylic, a course by Lucila Dominguez