An Introduction to Watercolour Painting with Jem Bowden (series)

In this gold-subscriber exclusive series, Jem Bowden takes us through the basics of watercolour painting. Together, we’ll take a closer look at a monochrome landscape (focussing on tones, techniques, brush control and hard edges), before switching to the same landscape as a two-colour study (with soft and hard edges, and a ‘wet-in-wet’ sky. This is a beginner friendly series.

In this episode, Jem takes us through the materials needed for the series.

In this episode, Jem briefly chats about the terminology used in this series, such as: tone, edges and wash.

In this episode, Jem demonstrates basic washes that we’ll be using in our paintings.

Let’s take a look at the scene we’ll be painting, as well as looking at an example with similar compositional aspects.

As we’re gearing up to begin our painting, let’s talk a little about how we’re going to approach it, and make sure we’re ready to go!

To begin our painting, first we should vaguely draw out the scene in pencil.

The next step in our monochrome painting is to paint a gentle wash over the sky and field.

Make sure your painting is dry before beginning the next layer - Jem shows us the best way here.

Next, we’ll apply a wash for the distant scene.

Jem demonstrates some handy dry-brush techniques to capture your trees.

Capture the middle part of your scene with another wash.

Time to tackle the foreground!

Now let’s complete our painting by adding the final foliage and birds.

You’ve just completed your first scene! Let’s recap before taking a look at the next one.

Our first painting was painted ‘wet on dry’ with ‘hard edges’. For the next scene, we’ll take a look at ‘soft edges’ for which we use ‘wet-in-wet’ technique. Jem shows us how!

Jem demonstrates how to use these new techniques.

It’s helpful to take a look at some examples of watercolour paintings to see how our newly-learned techniques are used. Jem takes us through his picks!

To begin our second scene, we’ll draw out our landscape in pencil before adding those all-important washes.

Jem takes us through soft-meet-shard edges and demonstrates how timing and other slight variations will affect the outcome.

It’s time to tackle the distant and mid-ground elements of our second scene.

To complete our painting, we’ll capture the foreground elements and add some finishing touches.

Our easiest cleaning-up session yet! Watercolour rocks.

You did it! Let’s take a look at the finished painting. We hope you enjoyed this series. Thanks Jem!