Free Watercolor Exercises to Practice Brush Control

This downloadable PDF features four mazes for practicing your brushstroke and improving your watercolor technique

Watercolor is a beautiful art form that easily lends itself to rich combinations of tones, textures, and styles thanks to its wide range of techniques. But, in order to master various styles, precision is a must.

Carolina Alarcón, better known as Alinailustra (@alinailustra), is an expert in negative painting—a technique that requires a lot of brush control in which you craft expressive illustrations by playing with negative space.

To help you practice, in this download Alinailustra shares four mazes to help you work on your accuracy and precision. To complete the exercises, trace your brush through the maze paths, without touching the lines and while keeping your rhythm steady.

Precision in watercolor painting

Unlike other painting styles, with watercolor, you can’t rely on white paint to add light and depth to your illustrations—as you can with oil or acrylics, for example. Instead, it's important to understand how to use the white of the page to your advantage. You'll also need to learn to play with transparency. For all of this, practicing brushstrokes is key.

To get started, these exercises will help you:

- Maintain the uniformity of your strokes
- Not to leave blotches
- Exercise the muscles of your hand and wrist
- Be more detailed

What is negative watercolor painting?

As you master brush control, you will be able to progress to watercolor styles that require a lot of accuracy like negative watercolor painting.

This technique involves making the main elements of a composition stand out through the contrast created by painting the empty spaces. That doesn't just mean leaving the elements you want to highlight unpainted but also processing the details and finishes to the max.

Careful use of the brush

When doing these exercises, keep in mind that the angle at which you hold the brush will also affect your strokes. The degree of inclination of the brush is crucial. For example:

- Holding a brush to a high slant will allow you to make thicker lines.
- Holding the brush perpendicular will allow you to make fine lines.

It's can be useful to practice this exercise regularly even when you get used to the technique, especially to familiarize yourself with new materials.

What is included in the download?

The downloadable PDF includes four mazes to work on your accuracy and precision. To complete the exercises, trace your brush through the paths, without touching the lines and while keeping your rhythm steady. You might not get it first time, but keep trying until you succeed!

After clicking on the link below, you'll find the Watercolor Exercises for Precision by Alinailustra PDF in your computer's Downloads folder.

If you want to keep learning, you can sign up for the course Negative Watercolor Painting for Children's Illustration, in which Alinailustra teaches how to add depth and charm to your illustrations through negative watercolor. For more, take a look at all the online watercolor painting courses on Domestika.

Keep discovering free creative resources like this on the Downloads section of our blog.

You may also like:

- 5 Free Watercolor Tutorials to Improve Your Technique
- 5 Online Watercolor Courses for Learning Different Styles
- Essential Materials for Painting in Watercolor and Gouache
- Artistic Watercolor Techniques for Illustrating Birds, a course by Sarah Stokes
- Negative Watercolor Painting for Botanical Illustration, by Cristina Cilloniz.