Wet on wet is probably the most intriguing way to approach watercolor, because it very quickly lets go of the need to control it. As soon as you add clear water to the damp paper and add some color to it, it begins to flow and spread and run and merge in ways that you can’t control with your brush. It’s one of the first principles of watercolor that the best effects often happen outside of the brush strokes. It’s liberating for some beginners to see those soft boundaries and accidental color mixing as pleasant surprises rather than errors.
Additionally, wet-on-wet develops the hand-eye connection’s awareness of timing to an extraordinary level. As soon as water hits the paper, it starts on a journey from absorbent to shiny, and color interacts with it in different ways at every point on that journey. Adding color too early results in dramatic, flamboyant blooms; later, in more subtle, nuanced dispersion. Learning to gauge the paper’s sheen can be a sort of meditation, making the painting process about patience and trust instead of speed. With time, this skill develops so that the artist knows how a given wash will flow before the brush touches the paper.
The real benefit of this technique is that it is so easy to teach. It’s forgiving, and one need not be concerned about hard lines and sharp details at the outset. Wet-on-wet allows for free expression and mistakes, as you’re not trying to make it perfect at first. For example, if you don’t get a crisp line between a sky and a background hill, you can indicate a mist or evening haze, even if that’s not what you intended. The work looks better and more realistic than if you had achieved a sharp line. Many of us have a special attachment to some of our early wet-on-wet paintings because they’re so real and authentic, even if they were not perfect.
But aside from that, it lays a fantastic groundwork for all the other techniques. Once you get the feel of water and pigment mixing on the wet paper, you’re developing the instincts for value, temperature, and edge quality that will serve your dry brush, glaze, and lift later on. Having practiced letting the colors flow, you have a greater sense of when to exercise the great restraint that will allow a wash to shine. Thus, wet-on-wet never gets left behind as a “starting” technique, but remains the underpinning of even the most intricate and controlled paintings that you will do in the future.
In the end, the approach simply encourages confidence – confidence in the media, in the process, in the little miracles that occur when just a bit of control is surrendered. With each wash that meets wet paper and results in a happy accident, the watercolorist is reminded once again that this is a medium that is most beautiful when given a bit of freedom. And if you’re just starting out with this radiant media, you can do no better than to load a brush with pigment, place it against a damp surface, and see what happens.