Just the other day I bought a watercolour set for the very first time; primarily so that I could try out the pencil wash study but also to try something new. Now I have no idea how best to proceed with this medium but it turns out that my kit comes with a couple of examples designed for beginners. With nothing to lose I picked out the one which seemed easiest for the rank beginner:
Now this isn't the finished example - it's just step one - but this is as far as I managed to get today. Initially I had to lightly copy the picture in pencil outlines, to gauge the overall structure, and this proved surprisingly useful as I needed to redo a number of lines while getting the template in place. After this it was a case of starting at the top and filling in different layers of sky, cloud and hill before letting the whole picture dry out:
I knew that I'd entered a new world when I first picked up my notebook of watercolour paper; it's as heavy as a normal sketch-pad but only contains perhaps a third of the pages. This isn't just an economy measure as each page is easily 3 or 4 times as thick as a normal paper page and feels closer to card than anything else. The reason for this is that watery paint just slides right across such a surface, without getting instantly absorbed, and this allows you to modify paint on the page for quite a while. Without this I couldn't have swept the deep blue sky right across the page; the only problem is waiting for it all to dry before moving on - which is why I didn't finish the picture today.