Unifying your palette

Now that your palette is set up and you understand how various watercolours interact with one another, let’s choose a limited palette. Often what results in a muddy painting lacking colour harmony is when the artist chooses too many colours to work with. The easiest path to a harmonious use of colours is by limiting it to between two and four colours. A wide range of colours can be created with very little, but pack a huge punch in a final painting.

If you begin running into problems with colours you’ve chosen, try to figure out what’s causing it. Is one of your colours opaque and mixing it makes the colours muddy? Could one of your colours have high granulation and that’s causing your blending to...