Watercolour is a medium of a few techniques used endlessly. Master these core moves and you can paint almost anything - because the beauty of watercolour is that the water does half the work.
Wet-on-wet
Wet the paper first, then drop or stroke colour into the wet surface. The pigment spreads and blooms softly, blending on the paper rather than the brush. Wet-on-wet is the technique for skies, atmospheric backgrounds and any passage where you want edges to disappear. Use granulating pigments (Ultramarine PB29, Cerulean PB35) on a tilted surface and let gravity help.
Wet-on-dry
Wet colour onto dry paper gives you control - crisp edges, defined shapes, clean strokes. Most of a painting is wet-on-dry, layered over earlier wet-on-wet washes once they are dry.
Glazing
Glazing is a transparent wash laid over a dry earlier wash. The two colours mix optically on the paper, giving depth and luminosity no wet mix can match. Glaze with transparent single pigments, and let each layer dry completely - patience is the whole technique. A transparent blue over a transparent yellow yields a green that glows.
Dry brush
Dry brush - a brush loaded with relatively dry pigment dragged across rough paper - deposits colour only on the peaks of the tooth, giving broken, textured strokes for foliage, sparkle and weathered surfaces. It rewards granulating pigments and a light hand.
Lifting and charging
Lifting re-wets and removes colour to recover highlights or soften edges - easiest with non-staining pigments. Charging drops additional colour into a wet area to enrich or shift a wash as it dries.
Matching technique to pigment
Granulating pigments reward wet-on-wet and dry brush; transparent, staining pigments reward glazing; opaque pigments suit accents and lifts. Explore every pigment's behaviour in the watercolour range, see them painted out in the swatch library, and read our Best Watercolours guide for where to start.