Paint Idea: Copying a Painting with Watercolors

If you’re looking for a good, relaxing evening activity or if you have trouble with finding your way (back) to painting this is a fun thing to do!

This is what you’ll need:

• White paper – The thickest you have lying around
• Watercolor paint – You can even use the one that children play with – I used that for years and made very nice paintings with it
• A brush 
• Crayons/oil pastels/pens/colored pencils – Whatever you have
• A picture of a painting you like – Don’t pick something for any other reason than because you just love this picture. No matter if it’s difficult or not.
• An open mind -This exercise is not about making the prettiest painting – it’s about enjoying putting paint to paper – finding out how this watercolor thing works ;-)

This is how it goes:

1. Just start somewhere and keep going! I would recommend starting painting without a pencil outline. But you might do that first if it makes you feel more comfortable.
2. Don’t worry about paint running into another color or messing things up. The most important thing is to finish what you started. So don’t stop before your paper is filled with paint.
3. Let it dry. And use the crayons or pens to emphasize a few things you weren’t able to with watercolor. Like outlines of things, or small things like eyes for example. Also, whites are difficult to bring out with watercolor, so if you have white crayons use them to make the whites better visible.

That’s it!

After this exercise I just hope you feel accomplished that you were brave enough to fill the paper with all these colors. And most of all that you enjoyed the process!

Let me know what you think! And feel free to ask questions if you have them ;-)

xx Merith