One of the best things you can do when you're starting out with watercolor paints is to create a color grid. Doing this will help you learn your colors. It will allow you to determine the gradation of each color, the transparency or opacity of each color, and the staining power for each pigment.

To make your color grid, you will make a space on the page for each color in your palette. Your marks on the page will be vertical and you will write in the color name for each color above the line you will make using that color. Before you begin making strokes on the page, take a waterproof black marker and draw a long, thick line of black horizontally across the halfway point on your page. Each vertical line you draw will bisect this line. Start simply with a thick black line across the page and vertical lines marking an area for each color you will add.

Next, take a color and paint a long stroke of the color down your page. Pull the color over the black mark and continue down your paper, getting gradually lighter and lighter as you go along, until you run out of paint. Do this with each of the colors you have. Be careful as you go to keep the colors far enough apart that they will not bleed into each other. Then let all your marks dry.

Once all marks are dry, you will make a second horizontal line across the top half of your page where the color is stronger. Here you will take a clean, wet brush and rewet your color and try to scrub off a small portion of the color. This will demonstrate the staining power of each of your colors. With this simple scrubbing process, I reveal the staining power of each color.

The part where your color crosses over the black line will tell you its relative opacity or transparency. If it fades into the black and you can hardly see the color at all anymore, it is a transparent color. If, however, it coats over the black and you can still strongly identify your original color, it is an opaque color.

This information is an excerpt from Watercolor with Annika Conner, an online course offered by Sessions Online School of Fine Art.

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