6 Secret Brush Skills for Watercolor Painters:
Painterly Strokes

Bands of Color •  Thick 'n' Thin •  Wrist Flick •  Painterly Strokes •  The Stab •  Cutting Edges
The feel of a fully loaded watercolor brush slapping on the paper can be exciting and scary at the same instant. Being free with your brushwork and paint can be a bit intimidating at first, but it is a lot of fun. You can see the brush shape in strokes made with this brush technique. Generally speaking any painting done in a loose and free technique would be considered a "Painterly" painting.
Watercolor Brush Control: Painterly Brush Stokes © 2008 Gregory Conley
Click to enlarge
Mix up some watercolor paint on your palette in several colors that may work well together.
In this exercise I used an old #12 Serie 7 Winsor & Newton round red sable. Not much of a tip left but it can hold a good amount of paint and still controls well for this technique. A #7 round red sable brush was used for a few smaller strokes.
Start by laying the full brush on the paper and lifting away cleanly. That is the shape of your brush fully charged.
Try more short dabbing strokes across your paper.



Watercolor Brush Control: Painterly Brush Stokes © 2008 Gregory Conley
Click to enlarge
Rinse your brush and change colors.
Experiment with some longer sweeping strokes. Keep your brush strokes uniform in width as you start to overlap strokes to develop shapes.
Play with different groupings of brush strokes across your paper.
Rinse your brush and change colors. Continue laying down similar brush strokes trying different angles of attack.
Allow your wet brush strokes to intermingle as you progress.



Watercolor Brush Control: Painterly Brush Stokes © 2008 Gregory Conley
Click to enlarge
This "full brush" painterly stroke lends itself easily to landscape and watercolor gesture sketching.
This brush stroke is only one of many that are considered "painterly" in quality. It is loosely based on the watercolors of Frank Wilcox, Frederick Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, and Edward Hopper.
Variations of painterly styles can be found in works as diverse as those of Charles Demuth, Paul Cezanne, Dong Kingman, Georgia O'Keefe, Andrew Wyeth, and John Singer Sargent, among many others.
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