One of the things I love most about watercolour is also, occasionally, the thing that drives me slightly mad: you can’t completely control it.

Water moves, pigment travels, colours mingle, and edges dry before you’re quite ready for them to. And sometimes a wash that looked absolutely beautiful thirty seconds ago suddenly develops a strange cauliflower-shaped bloom right in the middle of it.

But after years of painting, I’ve come to realise that many of the things we think of as mistakes are actually how we learn to understand watercolour.

You begin to recognise how much water is on your brush. You learn when to keep working and, perhaps more importantly, when to leave something alone. You discover which colours behave beautifully together and which ones turn into mud.

So, if you’re learning to paint, here are five very common watercolour “mistakes” that you'll learn from in no time!

1. Using too much water — or not enough

This is probably one of the biggest things to learn in watercolour, and unfortunately there isn’t a magic formula for it.

Too much water and your pigment can rush across the page, pool in unexpected places or dry with hard edges. Too little and your brush starts dragging across the paper and you lose that beautiful fluidity that makes watercolour so special.

The good news is that only real way to learn is to paint more! Which is wonderful because that's what we love to do.

Over time, you start to recognise the matte or shine of the paper, the weight of the loaded brush and the consistency of the paint almost instinctively.

So don’t be discouraged when the water seems to have a mind of its own. Learning to control water is really at the heart of learning watercolour.

2. Trying to fix something while it’s still wet

You put down a wash, notice a little area you don’t like and immediately go back in to fix it. Then you fix the fix. And perhaps fix that bit too.

Before you know it, you’ve disturbed a meticulously blended area, damaged the surface of the paper or created a muddy patch that definitely wasn’t there in the first place.

One of the best things watercolour has taught me is patience.

Sometimes the very best thing you can do is put your brush down, go an d make a cup pf tea, and let the painting dry completely. Watercolour changes enormously as it dries, and something that looks disastrous when wet can soften into something surprisingly closer to what you were trying to achieve.

And if it still needs adjusting? You can come back to it with a fresh eye.

3. Mixing too many colours together

We’ve all made a muddy messy mix by mistake before.

You begin with a beautiful green. Perhaps it needs a little more warmth, so you add a touch of red. Too much red so now maybe some yellow. And suddenly you have a rather unappealing puddle.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with mixing colours — in fact, learning to mix your own nuanced colours is one of the great joys (and skills) of watercolour painting, but sometimes fewer pigments give you much fresher, more luminous results.

Experiment with your paints. Make little colour swatches. See what happens when two pigments meet rather than five.

Those muddy mixtures aren’t wasted either. They’re teaching you exactly how your colours behave.

4. Expecting every painting to be beautiful/perfect

This is such an important one.

Some paintings will be lovely, some will have one tiny section you adore and the rest you’d rather not discuss, and then occasionally you’ll produce something that seems to bear absolutely no resemblance to the thing you were attempting to paint! This is completely normal.

We tend to see an artist’s finished work without seeing the many, many hours of practice and work behind it. Every time you paint a painting it teaches you something. Even if all you learn is, "ok well I definitely won’t do that again."

Although I won't encourage you to keep paintings you really dislike, it is quite amazing to look back at them six months or a year later. You may be surprised by how clearly you can see your progress.

5. Trying to make watercolour behave like another medium

Watercolour has its own personality. It loves transparency, layers and, soft edges. I love precision and fine detail, but I still want a painting to feel like watercolour. I want to see delicate washes, transparent layers and subtle variations in pigment beneath all that detail.

The skill is in learning what to control and what to allow, and that only comes with practice. So keep painting! And if you’re new to watercolour, please don’t wait until you feel “good enough” to use your lovely paper or your beautiful paints. Use them!

Paint the leaf. Mix the wrong green. Then mix the right green. Add too much water. Overwork something occasionally. Paint a flower that looks nothing like the reference photograph. Because every one of those little mistakes is teaching your hand and your eye something that reading about watercolour simply cannot.

There is so much joy in becoming better at something slowly.

And perhaps that is one of my favourite things about watercolour: there is always, always something more to learn.

Love, Libby x