Painting Too Light (Watercolour Mistake #1) 

I think another reason is that when you're not used to watercolors they look very dark while wet but they get brighter after. I still try to keep this in mind but i get scared when it looks dark aha

Teoh, you are really a good teacher. You clarify the magic of painting. It is always a balance of darkness and lightness to achieve the right dramatic of a scene.

My grandmother who taught me how to paint 35 years ago used to say “if it looks right it’s wrong!” Which was good advice for traditional painting.

This was very helpful, I hope you do make a series of these. With the different levels of paint the lady in red looks like she has lost a shoe or something :D I especially like that you showed that it wasn't ruined by starting light, that you just needed to keep going and add more color to improve it.

I tend to do this too mostly because I don't want to waste my paint. Watercolor lasts a long time though so I definitely need to get over this fear. Confidence is key! :-)

to be honest, it seems reasonable to do a low contrast sketch if you want to portrait a gray rainy day.

lol maybe he just came back from self tanning and messed up :D you never know what those people were up to :D gives a bit of a story to the drawing :D

I have this too-light-washes watercolor syndrome, too 😂 my teacher said "You should start putting darker washes of paints more, you know. You're too timid" 😂

Thank you, Theo. I feel like I struggled with this mistake for much of my first two years of working with watercolor. Maybe I still do. I’ve been trying to get more vibrant and contrasty with my paintings lately. But your video really helped me put something I’ve been thinking of into words. You are a natural teacher.

I tend to start out painting too light. If I need to, I can always add another layer of paint; but, it's harder to remove paint if I went too dark.

Good for you Teoh. Excellent advice for watercolourists. Be brave everyone and enjoy the difference.

I'm definitely prone to staying too light out of timidity with watercolor

You give great advice, Teoh, and I am always learning from your RU-vid videos. Thanks again, for doing what you do. Until you develop the skill to put down good light and dark paint, with your first strokes (practice, practice, practice), starting light and then adding additional layers, is better than starting to dark. Don't make the whole picture high contrast. It's important to remember that the areas of your picture with highest contrast, and sharpest edges, will get the eyes attention, and should be your intended center of interest. The area/thing you want people to notice. So Background is lighter and blurrier, and subject is darker/higher contrast. Except for some subjects, the background will be darker and the subject lighter (like negative painting a white bird, against a darker background). The magic of watercolor is how the white paper reflects light through the watercolor layers, so in general, also be careful not to paint too thick/heavy, to preserve the "glow". These are just guidelines, and there are times when the "rules" should be broken. Love to paint and share ideas. Hope this advice helps.

Your videos about mistakes are very helpful. It really helped to make my sketches better. Thank you.

Thanks for this. I look forward to seeing more videos with such great tips.

your videos make me genuinely happy ☀️ keep up with the good work!!

When I was new to watercolor I painted a lot of paint from the tube and didn’t use much water. I noticed everyone else using more water than me so I changed to lighter washes with multiple layers. Thank you.

This is definitely a problem I have. Thank you so much for this!! It's so helpful!

It's so alien seeing you laying down a light wash on sketches of people :p When I decided to go back to watercolor painting (I only used the paints when I was a kid) I had only available in my town those chalky watercolor disks. The washes were always dull and pastel-like. I thought it was normal, until I traveled to the UK and got my cotman set. For all its flaws, I love the paints and how it opened a world of possibilities with watercolor painting, but I do admit I grew used with doing this mistake of using light washes because of cotman's low tinting strength and not letting water sit long enough on the pans to activate the paints. Now that I own White Nights, some van Gogh tubes, the Daniel Smith six essentials set and a small Rembrandt set, I can see how cotman is miles away in terms of vibrancy. Cotman is a kit that it's good to start out with watercolors, but not so good to keep using it for so long as it hinders your potential to grow artistically and add more contrast to the paints. :P I'm slowly learning how to add more contrast to my pieces.

such a brilliant and effective demonstration, thanks a lot!

I do that a lot! I started out with more expensive watercolors from the beginning because I thought that might be a clever decision, but now I'm scared to waste the beautiful pigment. Especially when I only need a small bit of the painting to be in a specific color and I don't want to fill up my brush with a huge amount of pigment because it would lead to then having to clean the brush, resulting in wasting/losing all the pigment in the water jar :( Still haven't found the best solution for that. It's also very difficult to get the right amount of water on the brush, since some brushes can hold more pigment than water, my strokes end up being dry and I need to get more water on the brush, so I decide to put the tip of the brush in my water jar, then back on the paper the color looks way too light and diluted ;_;

Thanks for posting this video. It looks really strange not to see your usual bright colours!

Thanks, Teoh! This was great advice. Looking forward to what you share next!

Thank you! Great demo 😊

This was so helpful! I struggle so much with this exact problem. And then I have to go back and add more color and of course I dont have the exact color and its a mess. Thank you for this!

For me it's actually the other way around I use to strong color washes so often the first one often is shining through the second wash too much. I think it comes from my lack of patience and the fear that my colors are not strong enough. But in the last few days I got better in that regard.

Thanks a lot. You are right! My washes are too fade and I have to paint over it again and again and at the end it is clutter. Scuse my English. I speak French. I will try not to be so much afraid with colors. In fact , I love colors, so, let's go ! Bye bye for next tuto!

Thank you youtube for recommending me this helpful video

I was having issues noticing value contrast (or lack thereof) with a colored sketch so a teacher had me take a photo of it with my phone and set it to black&white

Excellent! Thanks for yet another helpful, practical video!

Thx for beginners tips video!!

thx teoh... another great video and I love that you too learn as you paint!

Great tips!! I still make that mistake on occasion.....

Hi Teoh! Thank you so much for making this video. This is one of the most frustrating problems that I am struggling with watercolours right now and your tips are really helpful.

This is excellent. It has helped me evaluate my work in another way. I am sure the lack of contrast has been a problem. Looking forward to more of this series.

Very interesting and informative video.

Your videos make so much sense and are so helpful!!! I come back all the time when I want to learn something extra :) now I’m off to try out adding more contrast to my paintings! And yes, please create a series...you’d have one very dedicated viewer here :)

Hey, you have been hiding behind me, looking over my shoulder!! hahahaha. My problem FOREVER has been to be a shy painter..using only weak washes and no contrast. I'll be watching this video over again soon. Thanks for sharing!!

Good work! You managed to show in few steps how value in painting works 👏👏👏

I've got a problem to make shadows, I never know what color or mix to use, if it depends on what is the object that I'm going to shadow or whatever. So I allways end adding a color which is not correct at all and it never look like a shadow. Any tips?. I also have this enough pigment so thanks for the video, will help a lot! :D

But sometimes, it's best to stop.

I have many, many such sketches. Flat, pale, no contrast. Scared to put strong colour straight on white paper!

I do love layering up the paint ... And I’m loving my new white nights paints... you always use this paint brush in your tutorials... is it your favourite? Thanks for your videos. I love them xx

I still tend to do this!! I worry I'll get everything over done with too much color!! I know, it sounds stupid, but it's what happens!! I have to change my thought process.

Thank you for the tutorial it is really help

Thank you for t his video, I retried to paint these days, so it's very helpful, can't wait for the other episodes!

Thank you for sharing your videos with us and very helpful video and I have learned so much from you so thank you very much for sharing.

I would love to see your "mistakes that beginner watercolorist make"!

Thank you very much. If you can please make more videos for beginners like me.

Thank you now I know my mistakes and I hope I will overcome my mistakes.

Looking forward to the beginner series Teoh!

Hello Teoh, I really like your art style! I always use lots of colour and was told by so called "art teachers", that I would do watercolours wrong, because they are not supposed to be dark or vibrant at all. It is very nice to see that my way of using watercolours wasn't wrong at all :) Happy Holidays to you and your loved ones. Greetings from Germany.

Really a good video, and I hope you do do a series of common beginner mistakes--it would be very helpful. A few things though. I think -*-some-*- of this is using "student's" watercolors-- it is really harder to get bright colors. I don't know who said it, but "student watercolors are particularly bad for students!". 2. One *can* do this intentionally with good effect. For instance, where you are using ink to actually create the lights and darks and contrasts, and the colors are somewhat in the background (line and wash drawings)..Thanks again.

Loved ❤️❤️❤️❤️😍😍😍😍😍 thank you very much for the máster class, I loved your art.!!! Perfect!!!

I was tought to apply many layers of colour to get the values but it takes a lot of time and I feel it doesn't allow you to sketch and get what you wanted to portrait. I think its a better exercise to simply get the painting in one or two layers.

A series would be great

Hi! I make this mistake more often than I like to admit. . In fact I've made it today,. 😣😅 I try to work on it but keep struggling. I love painting! 😉 I'd like to see more videos like this one. ;-)

Great video, coming from an acrylic painter who isn't used to laying multiple washes

Thank you

I do this far too many times I always paint far too lightly when it definitely should be darker I just have a problem with not mixing up enough paint

Thanks!!

Thanks so much for your very helpful video, Teoh!

Thank you so much for sharing this info! I definitely learned from this video 🙂

Same mistake in my case. And I can't get over it. But, to an extent, I like lighter painted pictures.

Awesome thanks!!

This is very useful.

You have really good informative videos. You may want to let your viewers know that the problem you were demonstrating comes from using too much water, which makes it hard for the paintbrush to grab and hold onto the watercolor pigments. Unless you are going for a washed-out look, you don't have to use that amount of water on such a small painting.

can you try new Huawei Matebook E 2019 with pen?please .we want to see it:)It' 12" biger and cool :)

I was totally ass backwards when I started watercolors not knowing I had to dye the paper light to dark so my first few paintings were a total disaster. I kinda do that with all my mediums now except Acrylic and Gouache. Hint: Alcohol makers this is the only method that really works for me.

Interesting! Go bold or go home! I like it

They are wearing the same shit.. you're right about that 😂

Hi Teo, have you ever tried to do tutorial to paint TV series or movies? I would like to learn how to realize sketches of horror movies and or TV series like Stranger Things or IT.

Thank you teacher 🐻

Thanks! Love your videos

*_thanks Teoh_*

Hello Teoh! Love this work.. slowly discovering all your videos and really enjoyint them. Can you tell me, the paper you are using here in this demo? I quite like it. Thank you in advance :)

Good one

I learn so much watching you! But my problem is that when I go back over for contrast (leaves etc) it looks so streaky. Is it me, or maybe not the best paper that dries too fast? Or I’m too slow?

what would you call this drawing style? i would love to study it, it makes watercolour painting so calming

Lol, just realized that Teoh painted the wiged potus :D at 06:42

I tend to use too much water...and wait till it dries...would u recommend less water at first...so it will be easier to make a contrasti when applying a second color?

I like how you pronounce shirt :^)

I love it ❤️

I still don't know how to make concentrated mixtures. When I mix, I end up putting more water in the brush to pick up the other color from the pan, and so on, so the end result with mixed colors are always very light. How should I correct it?

What sketchbook are you using here?

I'm comment number 100

Is the first sketch with black pen?

Thank you Man. Your so right. Lol

It looked better before

RU-vid isn't letting me like the video ;(

He is Maduro xD