Let's start with this little known fact...
"Learning to paint with watercolors isn't as easy as it looks" Although many art beginners choose to start with watercolors there is something they soon discover...
"It is difficult to get good first results because watercolors are hard to control" If you tried the simple and easy way to paint watercolors you would learn this from the very first painting.
So, does this mean that watercolors are wrong for a novice? The answer is...
"Not necessarily so" What you need to understand if you want to become a watercolor artist is that things often go badly wrong.
The reason is that you are using water.
The color relies upon water to move color around the paper surface.
If the paper is wet then it shouldn't be a surprise that color will flow.
So, if you have wetted an area you don't want to be affected by color, it will not come as a surprise if your loaded paintbrush touches that wetness and color spreads to places you hadn't intended.
What this seems to suggest is that incredible skill and care is needed when you are painting with watercolors.
Well, this may be the case for fine detail work but it doesn't mean that you can't take advantage of watercolor peculiarities.
Part of the problem for many artists is that they expect too much.
Instead of learning to work with watercolors they try to force them.
Guess what...
"If you think for one second that you will succeed with this approach you will fail, sooner or later" However, if you are prepared to accept that you are going to have to learn as much about how water affects the way color naturally moves you could discover significant advantages.
It may seem a challenge far beyond the capabilities of a beginner but this is not necessarily so if you are willing to experiment from Day 1.
If so, you are in for a magical ride which will take you to places that plenty of professional artists have never been.
You will see just how remarkable watercolors truly are if allowed to work the way they do naturally.
Instead of trying to push water up-hill you will let it go where the wet paper encourages it to go.
On the face of it you would think that this could easily be predicted but this isn't the case.
What happens is that the paper reacts to the addition of water by 'cockling', an ability to wrinkle and buckle without control or constraint.
It is this that many artists find hard to accommodate in their design plans.
Perhaps the easiest and best way to test the awkwardness of watercolors is to restrict the number of colors to just ONE.
By doing this you can quickly learn how watercolor pigments react.
This way you see how, even though things look bad, you can still get good results.
When wet your painting masterpiece will look a complete mess.
If you allow it to dry the result could be far better than you originally intended.
In the beginning it would be unrealistic to expect your paintings to be considered Art...
All you should be trying to get are results that show a steady progress from crude and primitive to something that shows control.
If you deliberately try to make mistakes you are sure to learn from them...
By showing no fear you will soon see the worst that could possibly happen.
It doesn't mean that the end results will be bad.
Once you are comfortable with the unexpected you can rightly, to a degree, adjust your painting style to accommodate watercolor irregularities.
Soon you learn that the flexible paint brush in your hand can do more than you think.
In a matter of 2 to 4 weeks you can be drawing lines and arcs and curves.
If you do this it is no more difficult to learn than to draw with a pen or pencil.
Using a single tube of watercolor paint and learning what you can you will get to where you want to go much faster.
Your costs will also be a fraction of most other new painters.
Does this make sense to you?