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The Dry-In-Wet Watercolor Painting Technique

A Crucial But Often Overlooked Technique

The Dry-In-Wet technique is not taught that much, but, it is an essential technique for getting the most out of watercolor painting. The dry-into-wet technique has two great uses in your watercolor painting.

First, it is a great way to get distinct soft-edged shapes in your painting. Things like distant hills and trees often have a softer look than objects in the foreground. The dry-in-wet technique is a perfect way to get the look of distant objects, especially as they look on on hazy or rainy days.

Second, it is a great way to get good solid but transparent darks in your painting – if you have the courage to add them into an already wet wash. It takes some practice, but the result is usually quite beautiful and, often, quite stunning.

In this lesson, we’ll use the dry-into-wet technique on two simple and small landscape compositions.  Watch and follow along to get the idea and then practice this technique  and make a point to use it in your paintings to add a look of professionalism to all of your work.

What you’ll need:

  • Medium round brush
  • Watercolor paper – two small sheets of watercolor paper, about 5″ x 7″ each. Recommend Arches 140lb Cold Press paper
  • Paint – Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Sienna

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Basic Watercolor Painting Techniques

4 Comments

  1. nemond
    nemond on October 22, 2018 at 3:50 pm

    Hi Tony, The video screen says…..Video playback aborted due to a network error. Any suggestions? Nancy Emond

    • Tony Conner
      Tony Conner on October 22, 2018 at 4:09 pm

      I’ll look into it.

  2. Paintncats
    Paintncats on October 29, 2018 at 7:11 pm

    Hi Tony, On Oct. 21, I sent you a note to the gmail address regarding other technical issues found in this video, as well as another issue in the “What Can Go Wrong in Watercolor Painting – Blooms, Streaks, Mud” video. The issue remains on this one; I haven’t gone back to the second one yet. I’ve also had that same network error msg, as Nancy but if I start over, it seems to go away. I assumed it was Spectrum causing an issue; interesting someone else has also had it. Thanks, Peggy

    • Tony Conner
      Tony Conner on October 29, 2018 at 9:13 pm

      Thanks. Without getting too technical, I’m re-producing both. Should be online soon.

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