My wife (@nida.draws) started painting watercolors during the pandemic. What began as a way to pass the time on weekends became a ritual. She paints almost every Saturday morning now, and I’ve become her reluctant but enthusiastic student. We’ve spent more weekends than I can count watching tutorials together, experimenting with different brands of ink, and debating what paper should we buy, cotton? Cold or hot pressed? 100%?
I’ve tried my hand at it enough times to have a genuine opinion on what works for beginners. One thing I kept hearing, and eventually tested myself, is that watercolor is expensive. It’s not, entirely. The cheap kit from your local stationery store gets you started. The colors won’t be as saturated, and thin paper will buckle if you overwork it (oh boy), but you’ll learn how pigment blooms in water and whether this medium clicks for you. As you progress, you upgrade by getting a better paper here or a quality brush there.
What I didn’t expect is how well watercolor translates to online learning. Unlike oil painting, there’s no ventilation problem, no elaborate setup, and no drying time measured in days because it only takes a couple hours or less if you use a fan! You watch, you paint, you compare. It’s one of the most learnable painting techniques there is, which is probably why so many people picked it up during lockdown, including at least four or five people I know personally.
From over 100 watercolor courses in Class Central’s catalog, I’ve selected the best options across every need: total beginners, floral painters, landscape enthusiasts, and those who want a live instructor.
Shortcuts:
- The Best Watercolor Courses
- Why Learn Watercolor Painting?
- Why You Should Trust Us
- How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them
The Best Watercolor Courses
Why Learn Watercolor Painting?
Watercolor is a painting medium where pigments are suspended in a water-soluble binder and applied to paper — or occasionally fabric, wood, or illustration board. Unlike oil or acrylic, watercolor is transparent by nature: light passes through the paint and reflects back from the white of the paper beneath, giving finished paintings their characteristic luminosity.
That transparency is both watercolor’s greatest strength and its most common frustration for beginners. You can’t simply paint over a mistake the way you might with acrylics. Corrections require planning — lifting wet paint, layering glazes, or embracing the happy accident. Mastering water control, understanding wet-on-wet versus wet-on-dry techniques, and learning to work with the medium’s unpredictability rather than against it are the core skills every watercolor painter builds over time.
- One of the most portable art mediums: palette, a few brushes, a water container, and paper is all you need
- Translates extremely well to online learning: no fumes, no elaborate setup, and fast drying times let you paint along with video tutorials or live instructor in real time
- Builds core artistic skills (color theory, value, edge control, composition) that transfer to other mediums
- Active online community across Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and Skillshare for feedback, inspiration, and practice prompts
- Beginners can achieve visually pleasing results relatively quickly, which keeps motivation high
- Materials are affordable to start: a basic kit from a stationery store is enough to learn the fundamentals
Why You Should Trust Us
I’m Fabio, and I’ve been watching watercolor tutorials on weekend evenings for long enough that my wife started calling it our “date night activity.” She paints seriously; I paint badly but enthusiastically. Between us we’ve worked through courses on Skillshare, Udemy and YouTube, tested paints ranging from student-grade kits to professional artist pigments, and gone through more watercolor paper than I care to admit.
Class Central, a Tripadvisor for online education, has helped over 100 million learners find their next course. We’ve been reviewing online education for over a decade, aggregating a catalog of more than 250,000 online courses and 250,000 reviews written by our users. Combined, the Class Central team has completed over 400 online courses, including full degree programs.
How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them
From the 100+ watercolor courses in Class Central’s catalog, I narrowed the selection by first ruling out courses with no ratings, minimal content, or instructors without verifiable credentials in the field. I then researched the remaining candidates through their full course descriptions, student reviews, and, where available, free preview lessons.
I prioritized courses that covered distinct ground rather than overlapping with each other, so that each pick in this guide serves a clearly different learner: the total beginner, the floral painter, the landscape enthusiast, the mixed media explorer, and the intermediate painter hitting a wall. I also made a deliberate effort to include at least one free option and at least one live-instruction format, since those serve needs that self-paced video courses simply can’t.
Platform diversity was also a factor. Watercolor learners tend to have strong preferences — some prefer the community feel of Skillshare, others the structured catalog of Craftsy, others the open access of Udemy. This guide spans five providers to reflect that range.
Most Comprehensive for Beginners (CreativeLive/Molly Murrah)
- Provider: CreativeLive
- Instructor: Molly Murrah
- Workload: 10 hours of content
- Level: Beginner
- Price: Paid
Taught by Molly Murrah, a past President of the Northwest Watercolor Society and exhibiting artist in national and international shows, Watercolor 101 is the most comprehensive beginner course in this guide. Over five weeks, Murrah walks through every dimension of the medium: color theory, paper types, brushes, composition, and painting technique. Her teaching style is patient and methodical, building confidence before complexity.
You’ll learn:
- How to select paper, brushes, and pigments, and what actually matters at the beginner level
- Core watercolor techniques: wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, glazing, and lifting
- How to control water ratios to achieve soft washes versus crisp, hard edges
- Color mixing fundamentals and how to build value through transparent layers
- Composition principles and how to plan a painting before putting brush to paper
- How to paint complete subjects, including portraits as a capstone project
Best Watercolor Course for Absolute Beginners (Skillshare/Ana Victoria Calderón)
- Provider: Skillshare
- Instructor: Ana Victoria Calderón
- Level: Beginner
- Price: Paid (subscription)
Before you spend money on supplies, take A Guide to Watercolor Paints and Brands. This is one of my wife’s favorite instructors on Skillshare and she’s completed at least 4 other courses from this instructor.
Ana Victoria Calderón, a Mexican-American watercolor artist, Skillshare Top Teacher with over 120,000 students (including my wife), and the author of four published books on watercolor, has taught more beginners than almost anyone in the online watercolor space.
In this course, she puts her encyclopedic knowledge of materials to work, walking through pan sets, tubes, liquid watercolors, metallics, and neons side by side so learners understand exactly what they’re buying and why.
In the class project each student creates their own branded watercolor guide, so next time you know what materials you have and what to buy next.
You’ll learn:
- How to compare watercolor brands across quality, vibrance, lightfastness, transparency, grain, presentation, and price
- The differences between pan sets, tube paints, liquid watercolors, metallics, and neon pigments, and which suits your goals
- How to read pigment properties so you can make informed buying decisions at any budget
- How to create your own personalized watercolor swatching guide as a permanent reference tool
Best Watercolor Course for Florals (Udemy/Broderick Wong)
- Provider: Udemy
- Instructor: Broderick Wong
- Level: Beginner–Intermediate
- Price: Paid
Broderick Wong is an award-winning artist, member of the Federation of Canadian Artists and the International Watercolor Society, and one of Udemy’s most highly-rated watercolor instructors with a 4.6 rating across thousands of reviews. Watercolor Painting Flowers by Award Winning Artist applies his signature teaching method, which consists of short, laser-focused lessons stacked in logical sequence, to flowers specifically. It’s aimed at painters who already know basic wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry technique and are ready to apply those skills to finished botanical subjects.
You’ll learn:
- Two essential “flower-power” techniques applied progressively across simpler and more complex subjects
- How to paint flowers, plants, and botanicals with accurate light, shadow, and texture
- How to achieve background effects, subtle texture, and depth in a single composition
- How to paint without needing to draw, featuring step-by-step guided activities at each level
- How to build a complete finished painting that integrates all techniques
Best Watercolor Course for Landscapes (Udemy/Broderick Wong)
- Provider: Udemy
- Instructor: Broderick Wong
- Level: Beginner
- Price: Paid
The natural companion to the Flowers course above, Watercolor Painting Landscapes applies the same structured approach where each lesson builds directly on the previous one to full outdoor scenes. Wong’s central teaching concept is learning to see like an artist first, which means understanding what to simplify and what to emphasize before picking up a brush.
You’ll learn:
- How to mix a full color range using just four tubes of paint
- How to paint trees, foliage, distant mountains, and water reflections
- Complete seasonal landscape scenes: winter, spring, summer, and autumn
- How to paint colorful skies and atmospheric depth using layered washes
- How to plan and compose a scene before beginning, which is a skill most beginners skip
Best Watercolor Course for Color Mixing (Craftsy/Kateri Ewing)
- Provider: Craftsy
- Instructor: Kateri Ewing
- Level: Beginner
- Price: Paid (membership or purchase)
Kateri Ewing’s course is one of the most thorough beginner watercolor programs available, covering techniques and the science behind the materials, such as staining and granulating pigments, lightfastness ratings, pigment numbers, and paper weights. Ewing, whose original watercolors are represented by Meibohm Fine Arts, brings a naturalist’s eye to every lesson. Startup Library: Painting With Watercolors moves from materials through technique and then into five distinct painting projects, each targeting a different subject and skill set.
You’ll learn:
- How to evaluate paints by pigment number, lightfastness, and staining behavior instead of just color name
- How to create a color wheel, color chart, and value scale as permanent reference tools
- How to mix luminous, harmonious colors using just six tubes of paint
- Wet-in-wet and wet-on-dry application methods, masking fluid, salt effects, and dry-brush technique
- Five complete painting projects: landscape, seascape, expressive mixed media, botanical flower, and a detailed bird portrait
Best Watercolor Course for Gouache & Watercolor (CreativeLive/Mary Jane Begin)
- Provider: CreativeLive
- Instructor: Mary Jane Begin
- Level: Beginner
- Price: Paid
Mary Jane Begin is an award-winning illustrator, author of children’s picture books, and a professor in the Illustration Department at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which are credentials that show in how precisely and playfully she explains concepts. Getting Started with Watercolor & Gouache Paints is the most approachable introduction to gouache available online, and it treats watercolor and gouache not as separate mediums but as complementary tools that work together. The course emphasizes experimentation over rules, making it ideal for learners who want to explore rather than replicate.
You’ll learn:
- The key differences between watercolor and gouache, specifically transparency vs. opacity, and how to combine them
- How to evaluate and select paints, brushes, and surfaces for each medium
- Wet-into-wet, dry brush, gradient, and edge control techniques demonstrated live
- How to use gouache for highlights, corrections, and intensified color that watercolor alone can’t achieve
- How to stretch and prepare paper for heavier paint application
Best Watercolor Course for Advanced Techniques (CreativeLive/Molly Murrah)
- Provider: CreativeLive
- Instructor: Molly Murrah
- Level: Beginner
- Price: Paid
Where Watercolor 101 builds foundations, The Magic of Watercolor expands on them by exploring texture techniques, wax resist, special effects, and expressive approaches that push beyond standard watercolor painting. Molly Murrah returns as instructor, and while there is some conceptual overlap with her first course, this one covers significantly more experimental territory, including mixed media applications. It’s best suited to learners who’ve completed Watercolor 101 or have some prior experience and want to explore what watercolor can do beyond clean washes and traditional landscapes.
You’ll learn:
- Texture techniques using salt, wax resist, masking fluid, and plastic wrap
- How to paint expressively: embracing the unpredictability of the medium
- Color mixing with an expanded palette and how to achieve luminosity through layering
- How to incorporate mixed media elements alongside watercolor for richer surfaces
- Compositional strategies for creating more dynamic and finished-looking paintings
Best Free Course on Watercolor Landscapes (Udemy/Colin Bradley)
- Provider: Udemy
- Instructor: Colin Bradley
- Level: Beginner
- Price: Free
Colin Bradley became a professional artist in 1982 and has spent over 40 years refining a watercolor technique that he genuinely couldn’t find in existing instruction, so he developed it himself. With 30,000+ YouTube subscribers and over 3 million views, his reputation for unconventional, highly realistic results is well established. This free course on Udemy, How to Paint Watercolor Landscapes with Colin Bradley, introduces that technique and applies it to landscapes like skies, water, trees, and buildings. It’s the most accessible entry point into Bradley’s wider catalog, and the price makes it impossible not to try (yes, it’s free!).
You’ll learn:
- Bradley’s unique approach to watercolor, which was developed independently from traditional methods, for realistic and highly detailed results
- How to paint skies, water reflections, trees, foliage, and architectural elements
- How to work with smooth watercolor paper (Bradley’s preferred surface) for precision and control
- Techniques that aim for detail and realism rather than the loose, gestural style common in beginner courses
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