Flowing Blooms in a Glass Bottle

Wet-on-wet is the technique that truly makes watercolour feel alive — paint flowing into paint, blending itself magically right there on the paper as you watch. This week you'll use it to paint loose pink blooms spilling gracefully from a blue glass bottle. We’ll let the pigments mingle to form soft petals and glowing leaves all on their own.

You'll also learn how to capture the transparency, shadow, and reflections of glass using nothing but water and colour. It's controlled chaos at its most beautiful, and it becomes absolutely addictive once you get the feel for it.

One Colour, Infinite Possibilities

Strip everything right back this week and paint using just a single colour to create a hauntingly beautiful underwater scene. We’ll paint a school of fish gliding through in silhouette.

When you remove colour from the equation, you're forced to focus on value (how light or dark something is), which is genuinely the single biggest skill in all of watercolour. Master this one thing, and every painting you ever do afterwards will feel so much easier. A deceptively simple exercise with enormous long-term payoff.

Bring a Cockatoo to Life with Splashes of Colour

This week you'll paint a cheeky sulphur-crested cockatoo and surround it with joyful splatters of orange, yellow, green, and red watercolour. You'll learn how to control splatter using different brushes and flicking techniques.

Plus, we’ll cover how to mask off the areas you want to keep pristine, and how to use well-placed splattering to suggest energy, movement, and organic texture. It's messy. It's playful. It's tremendously fun. And the results are always absolutely full of life.

Make a Sunset Glow Right Off the Page

This week is all about light — how to paint it, how to suggest it, how to make a painting quietly hum from within. You’ll create a luminous evening scene with a wooden jetty stretching out over mirror-still water, the sun melting low on the horizon, and silhouetted seabirds wheeling across a sky of warm gold and apricot.

You’ll lay down those gorgeous sunset washes that bleed seamlessly into each other, then use the bright white of the paper as your secret light source. The weathered timber of the jetty is your chance to practise warm and cool reflections dancing on the water beneath. It’s a proper masterclass in tonal values, and a painting that feels just like a quiet exhale at the end of a long, busy day.

A Tender Seal Portrait with Soft Reflections

Watercolour really sings when you learn when to use hard, defined edges and when to let things melt gently away into nothing. This week you'll paint a beautiful seal resting in calm water.

We’ll cover the classic "lost and found edges" technique to give the animal firm form exactly where it matters. And we’ll let the rest fade softly into the surrounding water. You'll also tackle the gorgeous, rewarding challenge of painting a believable reflection. A tender, emotionally rich piece that showcases watercolour at its most expressive.

A Graceful Swan and Cygnet in Pure Whites

Negative space is the secret weapon of the accomplished watercolour painter. Instead of painting the subject itself, you cleverly paint around it, letting the white of the paper become the swan.

This week's tender painting of a mother swan nuzzling her little cygnet is the absolutely perfect subject for practising this powerful technique. You'll learn restraint, careful planning, and the almost zen-like patience of knowing when NOT to paint.

A breathtaking, minimalist piece that will challenge and deeply reward you in equal measure.

A Bold, Loose Pelican in Just a Few Strokes

We end the term with the ultimate watercolour skill, saying more with less. This week you'll paint a beautifully loose Aussie pelican using just a handful of bold, confident strokes.

We’ll add a whisper of soft grey and pink for the head, rich indigo shadows for the wings, and plenty of untouched white paper doing the real heavy lifting. It's the natural, satisfying culmination of everything you've learned this term. Loose, expressive, and wonderfully free. A perfect ending to the course, and the style you'll want to keep painting in forever.