Watercolor Doodle
One of my favorite exercises for a beginning watercolorist is a watercolor doodle. This can be done with any color media – crayons, colored pencils, markers.
It’s easy, looks cool when you’re done, and you learn a lot - about your pigments (paint), their interactions with each other, different brushes, and how the water interacts, all without “ruining” a labored drawing.
Here’s how to start a watercolor doodle:
Find some space and gather your materials.
If you are using watercolor, use 140 lb. paper (I shared about paper weight here, if you want to know more).
Holding a waterproof pen loosely (here’s a great set with different sizes, so you can decide which sizes you prefer), make a doodle around a page of paper. Overlap your line to make lots of little shapes.
Roll your wrist, let the marks be weird and wander, stay loose.
Take a break! (That was already pretty scary.) Also, we need to give it a minute to dry.
Or, on a few spaces, use a wet brush before the ink dries to color some spaces grey.
For step by step instruction, check out this video.
Then, we begin to paint!
Try it out with your kids or parents. Talk about what the water and paint are doing. Learn along together.
I regularly do this when I want to paint but am not sure what to paint.
I just doodle with color.
Sometimes I cut out the part I like best and mail it to someone as a card.
Sometimes I do it in my sketchbook. It makes me happy to see how free and easy I was with color. It reminds me that it was enjoyable.
If you want to learn a little more about how to start drawing and working with watercolor, you might enjoy my free 30-days of drawing prompts.
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