Painting with watercolors can be very easy - and it should be when we are at the beginning of our art journey. Nothing stands more in our way of progress than the feeling of not being good enough. In this article, get ready to get inspired by four simple ideas, all with short instructions, that will help you ease into painting with watercolors.
Easy Watercolor Paintings for Beginners
The best way to get into painting with watercolor is with easy pieces of art to allow yourself to make mistakes. You will realize very quickly when painting that you will learn an enormous amount from the first mistakes. That alone makes these paintings especially valuable, even if you don’t end up liking any of them.
Below we’ll go through ideas that beginners can repaint, copy, or be inspired by.
1st Idea: Simple Tree
This is probably the easiest way to paint a tree.
First, you draw the trunk of the tree with a pencil and add as many branches as you want. Then you dip your brush in clear water and wet the spot on the paper where you want the treetop to be.
While the area is still wet, soak your brush in green paint and give the wet area on the paper a generous dab of color. The pigments immediately make their way and spread over the wet spot, creating interesting color gradients. This is by the way called the wet on wet technique.
Depending on your mood, you can add multiple dabs of color or use different colors.
2nd Idea: Sky with Black Outlines
This idea consists of two simple elements: The colored sky in the background and the black outlines in the foreground.
Choose one or more colors with which you want to paint your sky. In my painting, I used blue and red, which in some places created a soft purple.
The entire sky will be painted using the wet-on-wet technique that you already learned about in the first idea. Therefore, the first thing to do is to apply water to the entire water and then dab paint into places.
Don’t worry if the sky doesn’t look like one right away. Once you draw the foreground, the blobs of color will look like a sky!
The sheet should be completely dry before you start working on the foreground. You can draw it with a black pen, ink, a pencil or similar.
Whether you draw a house, a tree, or a windmill is up to you. The important thing is that you use a reference.
My reference is a photo of birds sitting on cables that I took on my trip around the world in Yerevan, Armenia.
3rd Idea: Simple Mountain Landscape
The mountain landscape is a great subject to experiment with colors. Before you start painting, you should choose one color for the sky and one or two more for the mountains.
For my painting, I chose vermilion for the sky and cobalt blue for the mountains, which I mixed with burnt umber for the mountains in the foreground.
It is important to paint the individual mountain ranges evenly and with sharp edges. So, unlike the first and second ideas, you’re not using the wet-on-wet technique. A large, at best even broadly shaped brush is the best tool for an even application of paint.
Start off with the transparent mountains in the background and gradually work your way into the foreground, increasing the color intensity.
4th Idea: Foggy Forest
For this idea, you have to paint a few more details, which makes it the hardest of the four simple motifs. Still, it is very simple to paint and looks more complicated than it actually is.
All the individual steps about how we can paint the foggy forest are explained in more detail in a separate tutorial.
Tips for Beginners of Watercolor Painting
- Always paint from light to dark! Otherwise, the dark color can dissolve and shift to where the paper should have remained light.
- Always have a tissue at hand when painting, in case you need to quickly soak up an accidental spill or dab your brush dry.
- It’s definitely helpful to read up on a new hobby, but it’s best to just get started and not think too much about whether the painting will turn out well.
- Feel free to draw a sketch in advance for your watercolor paintings, but use an HB or harder pencil.
- Watercolor paints are water-based, so they can be washed out of your clothes.
- Clean your brushes thoroughly after painting so they will last you a long time.
I hope you enjoyed these easy watercolor painting ideas! If you give any of them a try, please share your results with me in the comments. I would love to see your paintings!
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