---
title: Watercolor Painting
description: Watercolour is a transparent, fast medium that rewards control of water and timing. You will learn washes, wet-on-wet, layering, colour mixing and composition for landscapes, botanicals and sketches.
category: arts-design
subcategory: painting
difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced
url: /subject/watercolor-painting
---

# Watercolor Painting

Watercolour is a transparent, fast medium that rewards control of water and timing. You will learn washes, wet-on-wet, layering, colour mixing and composition for landscapes, botanicals and sketches.

## Available Resources

3 Books • 2 Websites

## Books

### 1. Mastering Atmosphere & Mood in Watercolor

**Author:** Joseph Zbukvic

Zbukvic's watercolour clock maps the ratio of water to pigment against paper wetness, giving a vocabulary for controlling timing. Step-by-step demonstrations cover subject selection, value planning, edge manipulation and atmospheric landscape and street scenes.

**Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1929834179?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** watercolor, atmospheric-painting, landscape-painting, value-planning, edge-control

### 2. Making Color Sing: Practical Lessons in Color and Design (25th Anniversary Edition)

**Author:** Jeanne Dobie

Thirty-one exercises on colour relationships for painters: pushing colours forward or back, exploiting complementary vibration, and building the muted greys Dobie calls mouse colours so saturated passages read as luminous. Also covers value structure and shape design.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0823031152?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** watercolor, color-theory, color-mixing, complementary-colors, composition

### 3. The Complete Watercolorist's Essential Notebook

**Author:** Gordon MacKenzie

Combines MacKenzie's two North Light volumes into 288 pages covering flat and graded washes, wet-into-wet, glazing, granulation, negative painting and edge control, then applies those techniques to skies, water, trees, rocks and buildings.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1440309051?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** watercolor, watercolor-techniques, washes, glazing, landscape-painting

## Youtubes

### 1. The Mind of Watercolor

**Author:** Steve Mitchell

A credentialed working painter, Steve Mitchell, demonstrates washes, wet-on-wet timing, edge control, layering and value planning in short focused videos, plus materials comparisons and full landscape demonstrations. Seeing water behave in real time fills a gap that printed instruction cannot cover.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.youtube.com/@mindofwatercolor

**Tags:** watercolor, watercolor-techniques, wet-on-wet, landscape-painting, art-materials

## Websites

### 1. Jane Blundell: Painted Watercolour Swatches

**Author:** Jane Blundell

Hand-painted swatch library covering roughly fifty watercolour brands, organised by colour family with pigment codes, granulation and transparency notes. Blundell also publishes limited-palette recommendations and mixing charts, making it the practical companion for deciding which tubes to actually buy.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.janeblundellart.com/painted-watercolour-swatches---introduction.html

**Tags:** watercolor, watercolor-pigments, paint-swatches, color-mixing, limited-palette

### 2. handprint: Watercolors and Watercolor Painting

**Author:** Bruce MacEvoy

Bruce MacEvoy's reference site on watercolour pigments, paints, papers, brushes and colour theory. Covers pigment chemistry, lightfastness testing, tinting strength and mixing behaviour in far more depth than any printed guide, alongside sections on technique and colour vision. This is the one reference a watercolourist should bookmark.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html

**Tags:** watercolor, watercolor-pigments, color-theory, lightfastness, art-materials

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