Hello, and welcome. I taught art in the public schools for thirty-one years, and since I retired I have taught a watercolor class for beginners at our senior center on Wednesday mornings. My students asked me to write the lessons down so they could keep them, and my granddaughter said, "Grandma, put it on the Internet," and set this up for me. So here it is, for my Wednesday people and for anyone else who has a box of paints in a drawer and has been afraid to open it.

Two things before we start. First: watercolor is not hard, it is just different. You cannot boss it around the way you can oil paint or a pencil. The water does half the work, and your job is to learn what it is going to do and get out of its way. Second: you are going to make a great many bad paintings, and every one of them is supposed to happen. I have been painting for fifty years and I still make one most weeks. Paper is cheap. Be brave with it.

We meet Wednesdays from 10 until noon in the craft room at the senior center, September through May, and have since the fall of 1996. There are twelve of us this year, ages 61 to 88, and only three had ever held a brush before they came. The center provides the tables and the coffee; you bring your own materials (see the list below, and don't buy anything until after the first class, when I'll show you what I mean). There is a small fee to the center for the room. If you are in our town, ask at the front desk; if you are somewhere else, ask at your senior center, library or community college, because there is almost certainly a class like this one, and if there isn't, perhaps you are the person to start it.

The lessons below are the same ones we do in class, in the same order, one a week. If you are following along at home, do one lesson a week too. The waiting is part of it. Watercolor rewards people who let things dry.

The art store will happily sell you two hundred dollars' worth of things. You need about a third of that, and here is where to spend it: buy good paper and be modest about everything else.

Paper. This is the one thing that matters. Get 140-pound cold press watercolor paper, in sheets or a pad, and make sure it says "100% cotton" or "rag" if you can afford it (student-grade wood-pulp paper is all right for the first exercises, but it will fight you). The weight (140 lb.) tells you how heavy the sheet is; lighter paper buckles the moment it gets wet. "Cold press" means a slightly textured surface, which holds the paint nicely and forgives mistakes; "hot press" is smooth and slippery and is for later; "rough" is rough. A 140-lb. sheet will still ripple a bit when soaked, so for the wash lessons we will either stretch it (wet it thoroughly, lay it on a board, tape or staple the edges, let it dry flat overnight) or simply tape it down all around with masking tape and accept a little rippling. Heavier 300-lb. paper doesn't need stretching and is lovely and is about three times the price. A "block" is a pad glued on all four sides so the sheet stays flat until you cut it off; blocks are convenient and I use them for small work.

Brushes. Two. A No. 10 round (or No. 8 if your hand is small) and a one-inch flat. That's it for now. A round brush with a good point does everything from a wash to a bird's eye; the flat is for big washes and crisp edges. Sable is the best and costs like it; the synthetic brushes made in the last ten years are very good and cost a fraction, and that's what I tell beginners to buy. Test a round brush at the store by wetting it and flicking it: it should snap to a point.

Paint: a limited palette. Tubes, not the little dry pans, and only six colors, a warm and a cool of each primary:

• Ultramarine blue (warm, leans purple) and cerulean blue or cobalt blue (cool)
• Cadmium red light (warm, leans orange) and alizarin crimson (cool, leans purple)
• Cadmium yellow light or lemon yellow (cool) and yellow ochre (warm, earthy)
• And one earth color that isn't a primary: burnt sienna. Burnt sienna and ultramarine mixed together make every gray and every brown you will ever need, from warm to cool.

No white. In watercolor the white is the paper, and we will talk about that a great deal. No black; it deadens everything, and the ultramarine-sienna mix makes a better dark. No tube green, at least at first; you will mix your greens from blue and yellow and they will look like things that grow. Student-grade paint is fine to start. Six tubes will last you a year.

Everything else.

• A white plastic palette with wells around the edge and a flat mixing area in the middle. A white dinner plate works for the first month.
• Two jars of water: one for rinsing the brush, one kept clean for mixing. Change them often. Dirty water makes mud.
• A board to tape the paper to: a piece of plywood or thick foam board, a bit bigger than your paper. Something to tilt it about 15 degrees (a book under the far edge).
• Masking tape, a sponge, paper towels or a box of tissues, an HB pencil and a soft eraser.
• Optional: a small bottle of masking fluid (see Lesson 6), an old brush to apply it with, and a hair dryer if you're impatient, which we all are.

Before you paint anything, learn what your materials do. Squeeze a pea-sized dab of each of your six colors into the wells of the palette. (Let them dry between sessions; they wake up again with water. Don't wash them out.) Tape a quarter sheet of paper to the board.

The whole secret of watercolor is the ratio of water to pigment on the brush. Lots of water and a little paint gives a pale, transparent tint; less water gives a strong color; almost no water gives a thick, dry stroke. Practice the difference on purpose. Notice, too, that watercolor dries lighter than it looks when wet, by a good deal. Beginners paint too timidly because of this. Mix it a shade stronger than you think.

Exercise: Make a chart. Draw a grid of six rows by four boxes with your pencil. Each row is one color. In the first box, paint the color as strong as it will go; in the second, add water; in the third, more water; in the fourth, so much water it's barely there. Label each row. Let it dry completely and look at how much it lightened. Keep this chart taped inside your paint box for the rest of the course.

A wash is an even area of color laid down in one go, and it is the foundation of everything else. Tilt your board about 15 degrees. In the palette's mixing area, mix more paint than you think you need — a puddle, not a dab; running out halfway across is the commonest way to ruin a wash. Load the flat brush fully.

Starting at the top of the area, lay a stroke straight across. Gravity will pull the paint down into a bead of wet color along the bottom edge of the stroke. Reload, and lay the next stroke just overlapping the first, picking up that bead and carrying it down. Again. Again. Keep the bead moving; never go back up into the part you've already painted, no matter how uneven it looks, because it is still settling and it will even out. At the bottom, touch a damp (not wet) brush to the last bead to lift it, or you'll get a hard line where it pools. Now leave it alone until it is bone dry.

Exercise: Draw six rectangles about 3 by 4 inches. Paint six flat washes, one in each of your colors, medium strength. Your first two will be streaky. Your sixth will be nearly even. Date them.

Same as the flat wash, with one change: after each stroke, dip the brush in clean water before reloading, so that every stroke is a little weaker than the one before. The wash goes smoothly from strong at the top to nearly nothing at the bottom. That is a sky. It's also the side of a barn in sunlight, the water in a lake, the far hills. Half the watercolors ever painted begin with a graded wash of blue from the top of the paper down.

You can also grade from one color into another: start with cerulean at the top and, partway down, begin dipping into a very pale yellow ochre instead of clean water. An evening sky. Try it.

Exercise: Three graded washes, 4 by 6 inches: ultramarine strong to nothing; cerulean to nothing; and cerulean at the top into pale ochre at the bottom. Then, on a fourth, paint a graded sky and, when it's completely dry, a simple dark shape of a hill across the bottom in an ultramarine-and-sienna gray. That's a landscape. You've done it.

This is the lesson where people fall in love. Wet the whole area of paper first with clean water and the flat brush — evenly, until it has a satin sheen but no puddles. Now drop color into the wet paper with the round brush and watch what it does. It blooms, it spreads, it feathers out into soft edges, and it makes shapes you could not have planned. Drop a second color next to the first and let them meet. Tilt the board and let them run. Cloudy skies, distant trees, fog, the soft inside of a flower, all come from this.

Timing is everything. The wetter the paper, the more the paint spreads; as it dries toward damp, the edges get firmer; once the sheen is gone, any new paint you add will make a hard-edged blossom (a "bloom" or "backrun") instead of a soft one. Learn to read the sheen. And once it starts to dry, stop touching it. This is the hardest thing I teach, and I teach it every single week.

Exercise: Wet a 6-by-8 rectangle. Drop in cerulean at the top, let it spread, and while it's still wet touch in a little ultramarine-sienna gray for cloud shadows. Let it dry completely (this is where the hair dryer is allowed, on low, held well back). Then, on dry paper, paint a row of fence posts along the bottom, hard-edged. Soft sky, crisp posts. Look at how the contrast does the work.

Now that your washes behave, let's talk about what's in them. With a warm and a cool of each primary you can mix nearly anything, and the mixes will be livelier than any tube color, because a mixed green has a little of the blue and a little of the yellow still visible in it.

• Greens: cerulean + cadmium yellow gives a fresh spring green; ultramarine + yellow ochre gives a soft, gray-green for distant trees; add a touch of burnt sienna to any green to calm it down. Nature's greens are much grayer than the tube ones.
• Oranges and violets: cadmium red + cadmium yellow, a clean orange; alizarin + ultramarine, a clean violet. Mix the "wrong" pair (alizarin + yellow, or cadmium red + ultramarine) and you get a duller, more natural version, which is often what you want.
• Grays and browns: ultramarine + burnt sienna. More blue, a cool gray for shadows; more sienna, a warm brown for bark and earth. This one mix will do more for your paintings than anything else on this page.
• Skin, sand, stone, old wood: yellow ochre with a touch of alizarin, or ochre with a touch of the gray.

Mix on the palette, not on the paper, and mix enough. Test the mix on a scrap before it goes on the painting.

Exercise: A color wheel: six wedges, the three primaries and the three mixed secondaries between them. Then a row of eight grays from ultramarine-sienna, going from nearly blue to nearly brown. Then a row of six greens, none of them from a tube. Label everything; this sheet is worth more than the paintings for the first year.

There is no white paint in watercolor, only white paper, and once you have painted over it, it is gone. So the whites have to be planned before the first wash goes down. A beginner paints the sky right across the top of the paper and then wonders how to put in a white church steeple. You can't. You have to have painted around it.

Three ways to save a white:

1. Paint around it. Draw the shape lightly in pencil and take the wash carefully up to the line on all sides. For big simple shapes (a sail, a barn, a snowy roof), this is the cleanest way and the way I prefer.
2. Masking fluid. A rubbery liquid you paint onto the white areas with an old brush (rub the brush on a bar of soap first, or the fluid will ruin it), let dry, paint right over, and rub off with your finger when everything is bone dry. Wonderful for small whites — fence wires, sparkle on water, the stamens of a flower — and not a substitute for planning.
3. Lifting. While a wash is still damp, a clean, thirsty (damp, squeezed-out) brush or a twist of tissue will lift color back out, leaving a soft light. Once dry, you can lift a little with a damp brush and a scrub, but never all the way back to white.

And about edges: a hard edge is what you get painting onto dry paper; a soft edge is what you get painting onto wet, or by softening a hard edge with a clean damp brush right after you lay it down. The eye goes to hard edges. Put them where you want people to look, and soften the rest.

Exercise: A white barn in a field. Pencil the barn. Paint a graded sky around its roofline and a green field around its base, leaving the barn pure paper. When dry, give the barn one shadow side in pale gray, hard-edged where the roof meets the sky, softened where the wall meets the grass. Before the field wash, dab three little dots of masking fluid in the grass; rub them off at the end, and you have three white daisies you didn't have to paint around.

Watercolor is transparent, so a wash laid over a dry wash lets the first one show through, and the two mix in the eye. This is glazing. A pale yellow glaze over a dry blue wash makes a green that glows in a way no mixed green does. A gray glaze over a sunlit wall turns it into a wall in shadow. You build a painting light to dark, in layers, each one completely dry before the next.

How dry is dry? Touch the back of your hand to the paper. If it feels cool, it is still damp. If it feels room temperature, go ahead. On a humid day in July a wash can take half an hour; on a dry day in January, five minutes. The hair dryer helps, but let it get past the shiny stage on its own first, or you'll blow the paint around.

Three or four glazes is about the limit on most paper; more than that and it starts to look muddy and the surface begins to wear. Get the first layer right and you won't need the fifth.

Exercise: Three overlapping hills. Paint the farthest as a pale gray-blue flat wash. Dry. Paint the middle hill, overlapping the first, in a slightly stronger and warmer mix. Dry. Paint the nearest hill, strongest and warmest, overlapping both. Dry. Now glaze a pale yellow over the nearest hill only, and watch it come forward into the sunlight. Three layers, four washes, one afternoon, and you have distance.

Everything at once. Choose something simple and close to home: the view out a window, a bowl of fruit, the neighbor's shed with a tree beside it. Then:

1. Look for ten minutes before you touch a pencil. Where is the light coming from? What is the lightest thing (that's your white, and you save it) and the darkest?
2. Make a value sketch, small, in pencil, with only three tones: white, middle gray, dark. If it reads at that size in three tones, the painting will work. If it doesn't, no amount of color will save it.
3. Draw lightly on the watercolor paper. Just the big shapes.
4. Big washes first: sky, ground, the large light areas, working around your whites. Dry.
5. Middle values: the shapes of things, the shadow sides. Dry.
6. Darks and details last, and fewer than you think. A few dark accents, the window in the shed, the trunk of the tree. Then stop. Stop before you think you're done. Every painting I have ruined, I ruined in the last five minutes.

Exercise: Paint the same subject twice, on two consecutive days, without looking at the first while you do the second. Then put them side by side with your very first flat washes from Lesson 2. This is the day my class starts to believe me.

After the eight lessons, the class keeps meeting, and we paint. There is no Lesson 9. There is just more paper.

• "My colors are muddy." Dirty water, too many colors in one mix, or going back into a wash that was half dry. Change the water, mix two colors instead of four, and leave things alone.
• "There are cauliflowers in my sky." Those are blooms: you added wet paint (or a drip from the brush) to a wash that had started to dry. Next time, wait. This time, call it a cloud, or let it dry and glaze over it.
• "My wash has stripes." The bead dried between strokes. Mix more paint, work faster, tilt the board a little more.
• "Everything looks pale and washed out." It dries lighter. Mix stronger. Be braver.
• "I lost my white." You can lift a little, or accept it, or turn the paper over. The back of the sheet is also good paper.
• "The paper buckled." Stretch it next time, or tape it all round, or use the heavier paper. A buckled painting flattens a good deal if you dampen the back and press it under books overnight.
• "I hate it." Put it in the drawer. Look at it in a month. About half of them are better than you remembered. The other half taught you something. There is no third kind.

September 22. Third Wednesday of the fall session, and we are on Lesson 3. Two of our new people have never painted a thing in their lives and both made a graded sky this week that I would hang. We have one gentleman who was a house painter for forty years and keeps trying to get the wash perfectly even; I have told him that is the one skill he needs to unlearn.

Coming up: the senior center's fall show is the first week of November, and every student who wants to hang one painting may. We'll mat them in class the last Wednesday of October. Bring your favorite and your second favorite, because the favorite is not always the best one.

A note about pictures: my granddaughter wants to put photographs of the class's work on this page and I would love that, but the film is still in the camera, and the camera is in the car, and we will get to it. In the meantime the lessons are all words, which is how I taught for thirty-one years anyway.

Other pages I visit: Charcoal & Coffee: A Sketchbook Online (a young art student; the drawing habit she describes is the one I preach) · Street Photography Notes (a different way of looking, and looking is the whole thing) · The Dahlia Diary (what we'll be painting in October) · Masters Swimming After 50 (one of my Wednesday ladies) · The SoHo neighborhood