Picture this. You’ve decided to start a new hobby but don’t know what to pick. You rattle through the list until you finally settle on Watercolour Painting. But then comes the hard part – knowing what to actually paint!
Easy Beginner Painting Ideas For Watercolour
Getting started with watercolour can be difficult when you have no idea what to paint!
When you’re new to the medium, coming up with ideas that are easy to do and also allow you to experiment with beginner watercolour techniques can be hard to find.
You don’t want to try something too complex, yet you still want to develop your painting skills and try a few different techniques that will teach you as you go.
I get it, I was a beginner once too! We all were. Don’t stress! I’ve gathered a few easy watercolour projects for beginners that you can absolutely accomplish!
These watercolour painting ideas will help you with your wet into wet painting technique, allow you to experiment with colour, test your brush handling and pressure, and allow you to just relax and have fun adding paint to paper.
Try these easy watercolour painting tutorials and ideas when you have nothing to paint, or just want to create something for your skill level. And don’t forget to check out my guide to essential watercolour supplies for beginners.
Peach Watercolour Tutorial
This peach painting is super simple for beginner watercolourists to create, thanks to an easy to follow video by Susan Chiang. This painting uses wet on wet techniques to create a lovely fruit piece.
Eucalyptus Watercolour Painting
This eucalyptus painting is a project that is really relaxing and simple to do. The wet on wet blends create such a pretty finished piece, like this one by Laura Horn.
Simply create wet “blobs” of water and drop different shades of colours into the damp areas. Using the tip of your brush, create the stem and branches to join everything together.
Watercolour ideas for beginners
It may still be cold out there, but this ice lolly (or popsicle) watercolour painting is perfect for beginners. You get to experiment with a mix of bright colours and use a ‘lifting technique’ to create a white shimmer of light by lifting paint back off the paper. You can get your tastebuds flowing by imagining the flavours on your ice lolly and even create a frozen texture using salt in your painting.
Dreamy Moon
We love how this watercolour painting makes us think of dreaming and relaxation, and it’s super easy to produce using basic techniques covered in a step by step video. You’ll start by drawing the crescent of the moon in pencil as the focal point to your painting, and then you’ll paint water onto the paper so you can carry out the ‘wet on wet’ watercolour technique. This technique creates a diluted effect to the colour you add and allows you to blend and move the colour around the shape.
This dreamy moon painting idea is excellent for beginners because it is an organic, natural subject matter you’re depicting, which means you have creative freedom to create the moon and the clouds as you want – anything goes!
Oak Tree
If you like the idea of painting nature, you’ll need to learn how to paint trees as they’re bound to crop up. This 6 step tutorial on Instagram helps beginners to produce an effective tree watercolour with beautiful shades of green and cute little dots for the leaves. Give this one a try a few times to perfect it, then why not visit a local park and put it into practice.
