30-Day Watercolor Challenge: Beginner Painting Practice, Color Mixing (Digital Download)

30-Day Watercolor Challenge: a printable daily watercolor practice for beginners. 30 concrete exercises, one page a day, about 20 minutes, tick the box.

Most watercolor challenges give you a subject a day ("day 4: a mushroom") and leave the technique to you. This one teaches the technique: each day is one specific exercise, the days build on each other, and day 30 is a finished small landscape that uses everything the month taught you.

——— WHAT YOU GET ———
Four printable PDFs, 34 pages each, instant download:

• A one-page How This Works, with the four rules and a short supply list
• 30 daily exercise pages, each with a concrete exercise ("mix twelve greens: each blue with each yellow, then each with a touch of red", not "practice mixing"), one line on why it matters, a tick box and a practice space
• The 30-Day Grid: one square per day, the whole month on one page
• A look-back page: put Day 2 next to Day 30 and see the difference
• Ink-saver editions of everything, in light greys
• Every page supplied for US Letter and for A4

——— THE SHAPE OF THE MONTH ———
Days 1–5 · Water & paint: swatches, flat and graded washes, wet-on-wet
Days 6–10 · Mixing colour: a three-colour wheel, greens, greys, one-colour values
Days 11–15 · Brush & edges: strokes, hard and soft edges, lifting, dry brush
Days 16–21 · Layers & light: glazing, a lit sphere, shadows, negative painting
Days 22–27 · Simple subjects: skies, leaves, a tree line, fruit, a pot of flowers
Days 28–30 · The finished piece: a value plan, a colour study, a small landscape

——— WHO IT IS FOR ———
Beginners who bought a watercolor set and don't know where to start. Anyone who has tried and found the paint hard to control. You need a student set with a red, a yellow and a blue, one size 8 round brush and a pad of watercolor paper. Print the pages on cardstock, or keep them beside your watercolor paper as a guide.

——— HOW IT WORKS ———
1. Buy. The files appear under Purchases and Reviews in your Etsy account straight away, and in your email.
2. Print. One page a day or the whole month at once. Cardstock takes paint best.
3. Paint. About 20 minutes. Tick the box. Never skip two days running.

Want to draw as well as paint? The 30-Day Drawing Challenge, 30 daily pencil drills from first lines to a finished still life, is in this shop.

——— PLEASE NOTE ———
• This is a digital download. Nothing is shipped.
• Files are PDFs, sized for US Letter and A4. Not editable.
• Colours vary between screens and printers.
• For personal use and single-classroom use. Please do not resell or redistribute.
• Because the files are delivered instantly, this listing cannot be refunded — but message me if anything is wrong with a file and I will fix it.