Watercolor Tutorial: Painting a Landscape

Step-by-step advice on painting a landscape in watercolor

Christopher P Jones is the author of How to Read Paintings, an introduction to some of the most fascinating artworks in art history.

Christopher P Jones is the author of How to Read Paintings, an examination of art’s most enthralling images and their meanings.

I enjoy painting all types of subjects. Landscape painting is especially pleasurable because it encourages me to look so much more closely at the scenes around me. Finding the right subject matter is not always obvious at first, but after a bit of practice, suitable scenes for painting seem to jump out at me all the time.

I took this photograph whilst on a walk in a part of England known as the Peak District, a national park in the north of the country. The pathway winding to the stack of rocks at the top of the hill feels like an appealing subject to base a painting on.

Photo by the author

Make a sketch first

As a useful exercise, I tend to make a quick pencil sketch of the scene before beginning the main painting. I only spend about 10…