First watercolor drawings

I can give more detailed answers later, but for now to cover the questions you asked:

I did this in about 3:30 Hours and I'm very impatient, should stop being in a hurry?

Watercolour does work best if you're patient with it & let layers dry. However: I keep a hair dryer with me whenever I'm working on watercolours at home, to speed up the process!

How are you supposed to do details when the water sploshes everywhere?

If you're not allowed to do mixed media (such as pencils for fine lines), my recommendation would be to let layers dry & then apply details using the wet-on-dry technique to minimise the water's spread!

With practice you can also develop a feel for how much water you need on the brush (less water means finer details, it won't spread as chaotically)

How to do white in a way it actually looks white and not unfinished?

Take a look at your reference photo, see how the white sections aren't pure white?

Save the white surface of the paper for your strongest highlights, and the rest will be thinner washes of desaturated colours!


I hope some of that helps!

Hey there!
My critique is to get more bold/use more paint and dont be afraid to get dark and more contrasty. Watercolor is less opaque than other mediums, but you can still get some boldness in it. I think this is more important than technique because no matter what techniques you employ, if the values are not there then they are’nt. Correct values will pretty much always come first.

Also, yeah I can only use watercolor (and pencils for sketching) I can't use gauche as much as I wish to and how nice it looked to use white and a more opaque technique. I have a total of almost 50 assignments for this class, mixed media are other assignments


My brain is not built to do 2 arts at once but I did try putting on a stream on instead of music and it helped me get 10x less stressed

Drying absolutely plays the biggest role in building up colours! Colours don't evenly mix together if they're still wet on the canvas, so mixing colours while wet is different to working with acrylics and such.

I like to put down a less saturated base layer as a kind of colour / value map, and then I'll build layers on top of it. Don't be afraid to come back after a layer has dried and add on top of it, that's a standard part of my watercolour process and is how I build up depth ^_^

In case it helps, here's a few pieces of my process:

• I mix most of my colours on a palette, since colours don't typically mix well on the paper (the chaos that is watercolour means they'll try to invade each other's territory while wet, rather than distributing evenly)
• Since watercolour is a transparent medium, layering colours on top of each other (letting each layer dry first) will blend the colours somewhat!
• You can get some really cool colour variation by putting down a wet base layer of one colour, and then dabbing in some accents or variations & letting the pigments interact with each other as they dry

That's the most important thing! Don't worry about doing a top notch job when you're new to the medium, just have fun with it and experiment ^_^


Some quick feedback on this one: you've done an awesome job with it so far!

I'll offer one suggestion if you want to work on it more (if not, just think about this as you move forward): if you start adding more saturated colours to your focal point, you'll widen your value range and the piece should pop a lot more! Then you can decide if that's enough, or if the rest of the piece needs more colour.

After that one video you sent I was really, really sold on watercolors tubes but unfortunately watercolor tubes are too expensive where I live (by what I saw) since they need to be imported from the first-world.