Well the super-short version of this is: Use it a lot. Ta da! You’re welcome! But wait! If you want some exercises that will help push you along the learning curve, have a go at the 4 below. These will help you improve your brush control and get better at using your paintbrush. They’re also pretty handy if you get a new kind of brush and you want to quickly get a feel for it. These are quick and easy don’t require anything other than your basic painting materials.

Materials required:

• A brush
• Your preferred paint
• A surface to paint on
• Something to clean your brush with

Exercise 1: Vertical lines

It’s that easy – pick a paint colour you like and paint vertical lines, first paint lines going downwards, and then paint them going upwards. Or vice versa, I’m not the boss of you. I find painting upwards more difficult than painting downwards – you’ll probably have an easier direction too, so don’t stress if that happens. It’s completely normal.

Exercise 2: Horizontal lines

Also not rocket science, but surprisingly useful. Same kind of deal as exercise 1 – paint horizontal lines, first in one direction, then in the opposite. Depending on which hand you use, one direction will definitely be easier than the other and that’s totally normal.

Exercise 3: Rainbows!

Woo-hoo RAINBOW TIME

Painting smooth curves is not easy, so this will definitely help you train your brush control.

Paint arches first going one way (left to right) then the other (right to left). This is another one where the directional difficulty will be related to which hand you normally paint with. I tend to use my right hand, so painting arches right to left is tricky for me.

Exercise 4: Circles

This is basically taking the arch-painting exercise a step further. A tricky step further. Don’t stress if your circles are wonky, they will get better with time and focus.

As before, you’re going to paint your circles in one direction (say, clockwise), and then paint circles in the other direction (e.g. anticlockwise / counterclockwise).

And there you go! 4 easy exercises to help you with brush control – give them a go and let me know how you get on. Also – do you have any go-to brush control exercises to add to this list? Let me know in the comments below.

I cover all of this, and more, in my Staff Picked Skillshare class: A Mindful Approach to Practicing Watercolor: Values, Palettes & Brush Control.

You can read more about this class over on my earlier blog post

Not got the time to try this right now? Pin it for later: