Watercolor Primer for All with Timothy Standring

With wit and whimsy, filled with a passionate knowledge of the history of watercolor painting, Dr. Standring will hold your attention during this five-day workshop in which you’ll cover all the basics. Fundamentally, you’ll learn with hands-on exercises that watercolor techniques are closely aligned with paper surfaces, brushes, and even the pigments themselves. All of these have interesting properties that lend to the final painting. Students will be painting in the studio & offsite at places such as duck pond in City Park or Red Rocks in Morrison, CO. Students are encouraged to exchange contact info during the first class and arrange to carpool.

You’ll experiment with cold and hot press papers, natural and artificial brushes, different brands of watercolor pigments, learn how to stretch paper, and set up your portable kit for painting on site while traveling for pleasure or for work. And most of all, you’ll learn how to discern what constitutes a true watercolor painting.  


Day 1

Our mission is to create visual poetry with watercolor painting

Morning session: Demonstration by TJS and discussion of materials and tools.

Afternoon Session: Recommended ways to set up painting outside. Working on a few compositions at the same time. Depending on the weather, we may transpose the morning and afternoon sessions. Discussion of the literature on watercolor instruction (see bibliography below). Initiating a color grid in your sketchbook.

Day 2

Landscapes (we may carpool to the duck pond at City Park or another venue)

Morning session: briefly in the classroom and then to an on-site location depending on the weather: different strategies with BRUSH HANDLING.

Afternoon session: classroom or on-site depending on the weather:

Strategies about working with COLOR: discussion of value, hues, temperature, transparencies, and opacities. What is a ‘flat’ color and what is a ‘fragmented’ color.

Day 3

Still Life (classroom with field trips: morning or afternoon based on weather) (working with small thumbnail sketches, digital images, or memory of objects.

Morning session: Demonstration of working with glazing and washes. Techniques: wet on wet; drybrush; scoring; using a stopper. Strategies towards setting up a composition. Strategies about working with COLOUR with watercolors on the overall composition. Working on a few compositions at the same time.

Afternoon session: Identifying watercolor mistakes on various watercolor sheets and ways to correct them.

Day 4

(painting townscapes or in the studio or outside depending on the weather)

Morning session: on-site painting landscapes using techniques covered during the prior three days.

Afternoon session: continuation of individual projects

Day 5

Individual projects on-site

Morning session: On-site location along Platt River and group lunch depending on the weather.

Afternoon session: Group critique.

Recommended readings:

Marjorie B. Cohn (with Rachel Rosenfield). Wash and Gouache: A Study of the Development of the Materials of Watercolor. Cambridge: Harvard, 1977.

Kathleen A. Foster. American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017.

Jane Jones. Classic Still Life Painting: A Contemporary Master Shows How to Achieve Old Master Effects Using Today’s Art Materials. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2004.  [Although this addresses still life using oils, there is much to gain from discussions on color theory, composition strategies, and lighting.]

Mark Kurlansky. Paper. New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2016.

Gordon MacKenzie. The Complete Watercolorist’s Essential Notebook. Cincinnati: North Light Books, 2006.  

Gordon MacKenzie. The Watercolorist’s Essential Notebook. Cincinnati: North Light Books, 2006.

Nicola Moorby and Ian Warrell, edited (with artists Mike Chaplin and Tony Smibert). How to Paint like Turner. London: Tate Publishing, 2010.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney. The Cloud Collector’s Handbook. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2011.

Charles Reid. Watercolor Basics: Learn to Solve the Most Common Painting Problems. New York: North Light Books, 2019.

Tony Smibert. Turner’s Apprentice: A Watercolor Masterclass. London: Thames & Hudson, 2020.

Tony Smibert and Joyce H. Townsend. Tate Watercolour Manual: Lessons from the Great Masters. London: Tate Publishing, 2014.

Timothy Standring. "Watercolor Landscape Sketching during the Popular Picturesque Era in Britain," in Glorious Nature: British Landscape Painting, 1750 - 1850, (Hudson Hills Press, 1993), pp. 73-84.

Michael Wilcox. The Wilcox Guide to the Best Watercolor Paints. London: Colour School Publications, 1995.

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  Timothy Standring

Students Should Bring (recommended but not obligatory):  

• Watercolor pad (Recommended: 9 x 12 inches, Chanson XL). Watercolor blocks are more expensive if your budget can afford them: [9 x 12 Saunders Waterford White (20 sheets); Stonehenge, or Fabriano 20 sheets—all 140 lb—or panoramic size, for example by Sennelier, 9 x 4 inches].  Cold press or hot press paper, but more control with cold press.
• Watercolor pigment kits from Schmincke [Horadam Aquarelle]; Sennelier, Windsor Newton, QOR, small .5 ml tubes are preferable than the half pans). If purchasing the latter, Pigment recommendations: Neutral Tint, Cobalt Turquoise, Lavender, Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine (or French Ultramarine), Windsor Violet (WN), Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Orange, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber, Raw Umber, Yellow Ochre, Transparent Yellow Ochre, Windsor Yellow, Ivory Black, and Titanium White 
• Watercolor brushes (Recommended synthetic brands: Silver Black Velvet is my current favorite; da Vinci Casaneo, Princeton Aqua Elite, Princeton Velvet touch, Raphael Precision, rounds and flats, sizes 8 to 14, perhaps even a smaller one, but sizes vary according to manufacturers; an inexpensive goat’s or boar’s hair  ½ and 1--inch flat brush); and an oil painter’s brush, number 4 bright (it is a small stubby brush on a long handle) 
• Two containers for water (Sea to Summit brand collapsible is terrific) 
• Watercolor palette—the flat rectangular box for mixing colors (Recommended: Loew Cornell flat plastic palette that folds, but there are many to select from on Amazon, Blick’s, or Jerry’s Artarama); or a Holbein enameled palette [more expensive]).  A broad porcelain white dinner plate purchased at a thrift store will do as well. If you purchase the plastic palette, wash off the surface with a plastic sponge and soapy warm water before putting pigment into the small boxes.  We can do this on the first day of class.
• ½ inch artist masking tape 
• 2 oz pump spray bottle 
• Graphite pencil (Recommended: Faber Castell 3 H “grip 2001”) 
• Pabeo drawing gum (purchased on Amazon)
• Cartographer’s Pen
• Roll of soft paper towels [Viva is recommended]
• Equipment for open air painting: recommended for lightweight painting easels with tripods at www.enpleinairpro.com. You can position your easel to paint standing up or sitting down, which I prefer to do.  
• Enthusiasm, curiosity, courage to mess up your palette, and questions!