Watercolor Painting sits in an awkward place online. Search for it and you get either product affiliate links or gatekeeping, with very little in between. This is a quiet attempt at the in-between: a small site about doing watercolor painting at a sensible level, by someone who has been mixing long enough to know which advice survives contact with reality.
The most useful place to start is pigment basics. Get that right and most of the common beginner problems disappear. wet-on-wet is the next thing worth your attention. Beyond that, the rest is fine-tuning.
Colour Mixing
A useful exercise: write down everything you currently do for colour mixing from memory, without looking anything up. Then do the same thing tomorrow without referring to today's notes. The differences between the two lists tell you which parts of your colour mixing routine are reflexive and which are still being figured out. The reflexive parts are where habits have set; the inconsistent parts are where deliberate attention will pay off.
Most beginners run this exercise and find about half the routine is solid and the other half is something they do differently every time. That is normal — and a clear map of where to focus next. Approach colour mixing with that map in mind for a few weeks and the inconsistent half will steady up.
Pigment Basics
Pigment Basics is the area of watercolor painting where habits form fastest, both good and bad. After three or four sessions of doing pigment basics a particular way, your hands stop thinking about it and the pattern becomes automatic. Re-learning a bad habit later takes weeks. It is worth being a bit careful at the start, even if it slows you down.
The way to be careful is not to be perfect; it is to be consistent. Pick one approach to pigment basics and stick with it for ten sessions before changing anything. If something is not working after ten sessions, then experiment. Switching after every session is the surest way to never get good at any approach.
Paper Choice
Paper Choice is the part of watercolor painting that gives the most trouble to newcomers, and also the part that improves the fastest with deliberate attention. A few weeks spent on paper choice carefully — rather than rushing to the next thing — usually outperforms months of unfocused practice. The improvement is not glamorous and rarely shows up in a finished result anyone else would notice, but it is what separates a frustrating hobby from a satisfying one.
The rule of thumb: if something feels off and you cannot say why, the answer is almost certainly in paper choice. Slow down, observe, and only change one variable at a time. Keep brief notes if you can. After a few sessions you will start spotting patterns that were invisible at the start, and paper choice will stop being a problem.
Common Mistakes
Common Mistakes is the area of watercolor painting where habits form fastest, both good and bad. After three or four sessions of doing common mistakes a particular way, your hands stop thinking about it and the pattern becomes automatic. Re-learning a bad habit later takes weeks. It is worth being a bit careful at the start, even if it slows you down.
The way to be careful is not to be perfect; it is to be consistent. Pick one approach to common mistakes and stick with it for ten sessions before changing anything. If something is not working after ten sessions, then experiment. Switching after every session is the surest way to never get good at any approach.
None of this is meant as the last word. watercolor painting is a hobby in which experience reliably outperforms instruction, and the only way to develop that experience is to keep observing. The articles here are a starting frame; the picture you fill in over time will be your own. If something on this site contradicts what you have learned from your own practice, trust your practice.