12 Reasons Your Watercolors Are Muddy (and What to Do)

Do you often have to spend more time than originally budgeted on a project due to muddy watercolor paint? It’s a pet peeve for many artists, so you aren’t alone. What are the causes of this problem, though, and are there any remedies?

If your watercolors are muddy, it is often because of color mixing errors (due to inadequate knowledge of the color theory), using stained paintbrushes, painting on damp paper, or going over the same spot on the paper more times than necessary. Any of these scenarios will cause muddying.

This article will tell you 12 Reasons Your Watercolors Are Muddy (and What to Do):

What Does Muddy Watercolor Mean?

Muddy watercolor often refers to a portion of your painting that looks matte and without any of the vibrancy that watercolor painting is known for. Sometimes, the muddying also changes the entire color to something far removed from the originally intended color.

Muddying can sometimes be confused for desaturation or muting-out. However, while an artist intentionally creates desaturated colors (who remains in control at every stage), muddying almost always happens accidentally.

Using Dirty Water

Some artists make the mistake of using one jar of water while painting when they should have at least two. With one jar, you’ll slowly contaminate your paint with the remnants of old pigment you’ve just worked with. 

You should use one jar to clean off the brush and the other jar to add clean water to dilute the paint. This way, the dirty water will not affect your final painting and make it muddy. Even while using two jars, change the water as soon as it starts getting filled with pigment.

Working With Messy Palettes

Having a messy palette is another reason why you’ll have a muddy color. The palette doesn’t have to be spotless, but it is easy to contaminate your painting with a messy mixing area accidentally. You should wash the palette once in a while and refresh the colors from time to time to ensure it doesn’t get messy enough to affect your watercolor painting.

Working With Dirty Paint Brush Bristles

After working with one color and starting work on another color that is very different from it, you need to ensure your bristles are properly rinsed. This is especially true if you are not looking to desaturate the colors.

If you are going to color next to the one you’ve just used on the Color Wheel or moving to another color after working with brown or another neutral color, you have to wash out the previous one properly, or the result will be muddy watercolor. The same also applies if you are about to work with a less opaque color than the one you’ve just finished using.

It’s easy to make this mistake when you are coming from using grays, browns, or neutrals. You’ll be less likely to rinse out the bristles than when you are coming from brighter colors.

Working With Commercial Blacks

The ingredients in color will vary from one brand to another. Still, off-the-shelf blacks such as Mars Black, Ivory Black, etc., are typically less vibrant, dampening, and creating a muddy appearance with other colors.

This is why many experienced watercolor artists don’t work with them. Instead, they create their own warmer dark color. Their reasoning is sound because apart from the fact that there’s almost no pure black in nature, ready-made blacks can also leave distracting and heavy-looking marks in a painting.

If you have to use ready-made black, you should consider adding another color to make it look warmer before painting with it. It would help if you also considered using Payne’s Gray or Neutral Tint to make other colors darker. Winsor & Newton and Daniel Smith, respectively, are good brands for these.

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Painting on a Damp Layer

Watercolor painting on a damp layer isn’t a good idea as it will almost certainly leave that muddy appearance you dread. You’ll get the best watercolor painting results when you allow the paper to dry completely. Some people also paint when the paper is very wet, but this isn’t for everyone, and there’s the danger of damaging the paper at some point.

Mixing Multiple Opaque Paints

If you’re always ending up with muddy colors, you should confirm that you’re not mixing multiple opaque paints. Such mixes can distort your hues a great deal.

Try to avoid opaque paints and cut down on the number of colors you combine in each session, and you’ll most likely reduce the number of times you’re left with muddy watercolor.

If your watercolor painting is muddy, it is best to limit your color mixing to a maximum of three colors and then let the mix dry completely before adding more paint (where necessary). For the best results, you need to have a proper understanding of color mixing. This will help ensure a more deliberate mixing of colors to get the outcome you want and avoid accidental muddying.

One major issue with watercolor mixing is that you also have to pay attention to what happens on the paper. Even when you have no intention of mixing colors, they can bleed together while on the paper. Therefore, you need to keep a bit of space using two colors that can combine and create another. A red portion painted directly next to a green one can lead to muddy brownish color once they come in contact.

Painting While a Layer Is Still Wet

Your patience will be tested as a watercolor artist from time to time, even as you accumulate more experience. You’ll be tempted to start painting even when a layer hasn’t quite dried. Things like putting a new layer on a partly dried wash or painting right next to some wet paint are a recipe for muddying. You’ll find the colors bleeding into each other in no time.

When this happens, the next natural step is to try and prevent the mixing with dabbing, but in many cases, this makes things worse. It takes a lot of practice to learn how to wait for layers to dry, but even experience may not cure impatience.

If you’re finding it difficult to adapt to waiting for the watercolors to dry, you can consider getting a heat tool like the Mlife Mini Heat Gun. It will help you to speed up the painting process a great deal. While using this tool, however, you need to take extreme care to avoid overheating the paper, making it curl. In worst-case scenarios, you’ll end up damaging your work table.

If you don’t want to buy a heat gun, you can expose the paper to moderate sunlight or a little breeze. Basically, any approach that can reduce the moisture on the paper will help. 

Another good tip is to work on multiple paintings at the same time. This way, you can set aside each one to dry while you work on the next. You won’t feel the waiting time required for the paint to dry this way.

Random Color Choices

To reduce the chances of muddying, you need to pick the colors you’ll need for a session before you get started on a project. When you make random choices, there is a high chance you’ll end up with a muddy watercolor painting.

Go over the color wheel and choose the necessary colors you need for a project right from the start. How will you create the colors? How will you get shadows and darker variants of the said colors? Pay attention to the possible mixes that can happen on the paper with each color you pick, so you’ll know which colors to drop or what precautions to take for an overall clean result.

For beginners, Working with a few colors per project is also an excellent way to get more comfortable with watercolor painting.

A good tip that works when choosing colors is to make a puddle of each color you intend to use for a project on a piece of white watercolor paper or in a sketchbook and allow the colors to overlap. If you end up with mud, you can change the colors or reduce the number of colors you’ve chosen until you have better results.

Mixing Brown With Other Colors

This is another mistake that leads to muddy watercolors resulting from an inadequate understanding of the color wheel. If you mix brown with any color other than brown, you’ll get mud. If you have a color mix that contains blue, yellow, and red or blue, purple, and yellow, you’ll end up with muddy brown.

The tip above about testing out colors before you start working will also come in handy here if you have to use colors that can potentially create brown or if you need to use some brown in the painting. Once you know that your chosen colors can create brown or make brown look muddy, it’s all about taking the right precautions during the painting process.

Leaving a slight space between the colors and waiting for one color to dry before starting working with another are excellent ways to avoid the unwanted mix.

Watercolor Tutorial | Avoiding muddy colors with these THREE tips…

Jenna Rainey

Working Too Slowly

Watercolor painting is generally time-sensitive. You have to work fast in some cases if you are to get the result you’re looking for and avoid muddying. If you work too slowly, you could end up with hard lines, streaky strokes, and a rougher blend than you’d want.

Working on a color mix that has dried faster than you’d want can lead to mud. This is why it’s important to work as quickly as possible. The watercolor painting will test your speed of actual painting, while it also tests your patience in waiting for the optimal dry time, as we’ve discussed above.

The optimal work time for any watercolor painting will come down to a range of factors, including the following:

• The paper quality
• The paints you use
• The brushes
• The climate you live in

These factors make it a bit more difficult to give comprehensive guidance on avoiding muddying as a result of working too slowly. What translates as “too slow” for one artist will differ for another based on these factors.

The best way to deal with this is to practice. Over time, you will get a feel of the optimal speed for working on your painting. It would help if you also experimented a bit. What results will you get if you use a wetter brush and less pigment? How about when you wet the paper before you add pigment?

You should also pay attention to how your watercolor paints react to your paper when you use brushes. It will take some trial and error, but after a while, you’ll have a clearer understanding of how fast you need to be while painting. With more experience, muddying due to being too slow will no longer be a problem for you.

Working on a Portion Longer Than Necessary

If you’ve been painting with acrylics and oils for a while, you are probably used to layering and brushing over the same area multiple times. Bringing this approach to watercolor painting will lead to a muddy appearance.

With watercolor, you need to limit the frequency of moving around the paint once you’ve placed it. You also need to reduce the number of layers if you want a crisp outcome. You can move the paint around a bit, but brushing over a specific spot excessively is one of the main causes of muddying.

One of the reasons you find it harder to drop your washes is that you don’t have a clear idea of what the painting should look like when you are done. You should visualize the outcome of your painting and devise a general plan for achieving that result before you get started.

If you’re not sure of what you are looking to accomplish, you’ll end up hesitating a great deal and making several avoidable mistakes that you’ll end up trying to fix. This isn’t to say that you won’t make any mistakes with better visualization and planning, but you’ll keep them to the barest minimum. When the mistakes do happen, they’ll be smaller and thus, requiring minimal touches to fix.

Do you think you need to practice a specific technique first before you start painting a piece? Go ahead with it. If you start work on your painting after much practice, you’ll feel a lot more confident and will be in a better position to create a neater painting.

When you make a mistake, don’t sweat it. You need to use your absorbent towel or semi-dry paintbrush bristles to mop up the excess paint and water, then allow the area to dry. Once the paper has regained its strength, the mistake will be less noticeable. This way, you’ll avoid creating muddy watercolor, or in worst-case scenarios, damaging the paper.

Using Poor Quality Watercolor Paints

Do you use cheap watercolor paints made for students? These paints are made with a cheap pigment and base; thus, they’ll create muddy watercolor as soon as you mix two or three paints. For some affordable options that can be mixed, you should consider paints such as the Winsor & Newton Cotman set or the Ohuhu 24 Premium.

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When buying non-professional watercolor paints, you should pay attention to the pigment used in making the colors. Mono Pigment options are the best as they can be mixed without a resulting mud appearance. Those that contain two to three pigments, on the other hand, have to be used separately.

Low-quality watercolor paints tend to contain a lot of filler, usually kaolin, and minimal pigment. Kaolin is a clay mineral, so it is no surprise that such paints tend to get muddy when painting with them.

Final Words

If you are constantly faced with muddy watercolors while painting, it could result from several factors. However, the most common ones tend to relate to inexperience and a lack of understanding of the color theory. If you don’t know what colors to mix, you will most likely end up with muddy watercolor per time.

You also need to ensure you are using quality watercolor paint, not meant for practice purposes or play-painting by kids. Look for mono pigment watercolor paints close to professional grade for non-muddy watercolor texture and appearance.

Sources

• Quora: Why do my watercolors look muddy when they mix?
• Little Coffee Fox: WATERCOLOR MISTAKES: 7 THINGS YOU’RE PROBABLY DOING & HOW TO FIX THEM
• Erik Lankastar: Watercolor Painting: 10 Tips to Avoid Muddy Colors
• Draw Paint Academy: What Are Muddy Colors And How Can You Avoid Them In Your Paintings
• Jennifer Branch: 4 Reasons Your Watercolor Paintings Are Muddy
• Enchanted Learning: Color Mixing
• How to avoid muddy watercolours