Negative painting

Start with something simple. Draw some simple clouds.
Now prepare a wash of cobalt blue and a wash of Cobalt blue with a smidgen of Alizarin Crimson.
Wet your paper and quickly paint with your first wash around the clouds.
Clean your brush and add water to your edges to make them soft and smooth.

Let your painting dry and add some color effects with your second wash. Again smoothen the edges with clean water.

Try it, it's fun and you get some amazing effects!

Negative painting

Sometimes the white of the paper cannot be recovered even if you scrub or try to lift the color off. It happens quit often and then the white of the paper is gone for good.

Negative painting requires some thought and you will have keep the object in mind that you want to appear light. Every time you see an object that you want to keep light or white, think of the area around it. This is the area that you need to paint.

Lots of practice ideas to come!

Scratching

Scratching techniques

Scratch a line with a fine sharp point, I usually use the back end of a brush, a knife or a credit card. Some brushes have a sharp end or scraper built into the handle. Use those first! The wet paint is sucked into the bruised paper fibers as you scratch across the wash, creating dark lines.

Used carefully, this technique is excellent for adding details to landscape paintings. Fall or winter scenes will always show naked trees and branches.

Notice the dark edges that automatically form where you scrape away the paint. You have to be quick before your background sky or landscape dries!

Had I waited another minute the scraped areas would not have as much back fill (smooth edges).

Timing is everything. Scrape too soon, you'll get backfill. Scrape too late and it won't work at all.

Experiment!

Get your art supplies here!

Mixed washes

Now you can be a bit more adventurous with your colors!
Prepare three colors on your palette. (or as many as you would like)
Mix some light blue, some mysterious light purple and a bit of happy light yellow.
Use three brushes!
Wet your paper thouroughly.

Quickly apply the colors with dabs on the wet paper and let gravity do its job. You can help gravity along by turning the paper to suit your purposes.

I used this method for one of my childrens books
Spotty

Graded Wash

Graded Wash

Draw or imagine another rectangle.
Imagine you are painting a landscape and this will be the sky. Remember that the intensity of the color of the sky will recede the further away you are.
At the top of your picture the sky will be darkest and where the sky meets the horizon it will be the lightest.

Mix a liberal amount of blue on your palette. Also mix a lighter shade of blue (just add water) to have it ready for you practice masterpiece.

Now start:
Fill your brush with your darker shade of blue.
Start on the upper left corner of your rectange, or upper right corner if you are left handed.
Gently paint your first line.

Dab your brush on a paper towel and refill your brush with the lighter mixture.
Start your second stroke overlapping the bottom of the previous stroke.
You will see that the top stroke has already blended with your second stroke!

Now rinse your brush and blot it on a towel, refill from the lighter mixture. Overlap!
This is your third line across.

Now rinse your brush again to further lighten the color, overlap your previous line and soon you will have a finished sky!

This takes practice! But don't give up!

Get your supplies!

First Practise - washes

Have fun! Experiment! Go wild with your color creations! But if you are truly serious, there are some lessons you will have to learn. And do it again and again and again until you have mastered this lesson.

Watercolor wash:

Draw a rectangle or imagine a rectangle on your paper. Use a flat 1” brush.
Mix a liberal amount of paint and fill your brush.
Start on the upper left corner of your rectange, or upper right corner if you are left handed.
Gently paint your first line.

Refill your brush for your second line.
As you paint across your rectangle make sure you overlap the beads of paint that had formed at the bottom of your first line.
Keep a tissue handy, you wont need it for your tears of joy just yet, but to mop off some drips that may run wildly down your paper.

Refill your brush for your third line, etc, etc and keep going until your rectangle is done.

If you accidently miss the connection of your previous stroke, refill your brush and right away repeat that stroke making sure you overlap your previous line..

Carefully soak up the beads of color at the bottom of your rectangle. I use a dry brush.

Let your rectangle dry and if your rectangle is colored evenly, well done! Congratulations!

Get your supplies!

practise

The first two items you need are paper and paint. Much of the final outcome while painting depends on the quality and texture of paper. The most common ones are cold pressed, hot pressed and rough paper, but it is the cold pressed paper which is the most popular among artists due to its texture and versatility. 
But to start practising use a good grade student's paper.

There are hundreds of tube and cake watercolor paints available to the artist, and this might be confusing for a beginner. Many colors are made up of more than one pigment, and there are pigments that are transparent or opaque. Some are staining, some are not and can be lifted off even when dry. Be patient, soon you will want to experiment with different paints and textures.

These are the basic colors I usually start off with:

Ultramarine Blue 
Phthalo Blue 
Burnt Sienna 
Raw Sienna
Permanent Alizarin Crimson 
Indian Yellow 
Aureolin

Now it is time to practise! To create your first 'Color Symphony' start with the Wet in Wet method. This is an exciting exercise to observe the free flowing possibilities of watercolor. Practice often, it's fun.

Wet in wet is simply the process of applying pigment to wet paper. The results vary from soft undefined shapes to slightly blurred designs, depending on how wet the paper is.

Simply wet the paper with a large brush and paint. If you apply soft colors it will create subtle background regions for your painting. But be courageous! Apply strong colors and see how they blend, flow and move!
Let your first wet on wet painting dry thourouly!!! This is very important! Now you can add more paint!