It’s a familiar moment. You sit down with your paints, thinking it will be a quiet, relaxing half hour, and within minutes you’re clenching your jaw, frowning, concentrating hard, and desperately fiddling with a wash, trying to get everything just right. The petals aren’t quite right, the edges feel awkward, and somehow the whole thing has become a bit tense.
That’s usually the point where it helps to take a different approach.
Instead of trying to control everything, you can let the water do the work. Allow things to be a little softer, a little looser — what I like to think of as “blobby” painting. In this video, I show you how I do this in real life.
I start a painting session with an idea in mind. Today’s was: “I’m going to paint a vase of simple flowers.” I played with my new colours, experimented with what they could do for me, added gold paint — just got familiar with painting again after a few days off.
Now to start. And the moment I began to paint, an entirely different painting began to emerge from my brush. The key, at this point, is not to try to drag your painting back to where you had intended it to go. Just let the paint and water do the work.
You don’t have to push your paint around or fix what it naturally does. You just watch it happen.
Breathe.
And watch paint dry.
A big part of this is the drop wash technique, a wonderfully simple method of painting I’ve used for many decades. You put down a soft wash of colour — or even just plain water — and while it’s still wet, you drop in reasonably concentrated pigment (not too much water).
Then you sit back and pause while the paint spreads out across the paper and creates marvellous designs all by itself.
Relax.
You’ve begun your first blobby painting!
Your subject might be blobby blooms, blobby leaves (my favourite), blobby little birds, cats, or other simple animal shapes. The idea is that you don’t necessarily decide ahead of time what your blob will be — although you might. Instead, wait for the paint to tell you what it wants to be.
Once you sense you are painting a flower, you can begin to add more form and interest: more transparent washes, textures made with salt or plastic wrap, blotting with a sponge or paper towel — or nothing at all, depending on where the painting tells you it wants to go.
Breathe again.
When you’re not trying to manage every outcome, your mind can settle. There’s something very calming about following the movement of the paint — the way one colour drifts into another, the way a shape gently forms and shifts. It gives you just enough to focus on, without any pressure.
This is a very forgiving way to paint. There’s no sense of getting it wrong. If something spreads a little further than expected, it often adds interest rather than spoiling anything. That takes away a lot of the hesitation that can creep in when you’re trying to be precise.
And because it’s so straightforward, you can create something satisfying quite quickly. You don’t need a long stretch of time or a lot of preparation. A few minutes, a brush, some paint, a black, white, or gold pen, and an episode of something boring on TV — and you’re there.
If you enjoy a bit of texture, modern granulating colours can add a lovely extra dimension as they settle into the paper, as you saw in this video. But they’re not essential. The real shift comes from letting go and trusting the process.
In the end, this kind of painting is less about technique and more about how it feels. It’s a chance to step out of that focused, problem-solving mindset and into something quieter and more restful.
So whether it’s a few blobby flowers, a small bird, or a soft little cat, you’re simply giving yourself a bit of space — to slow down, to relax, and to enjoy watching something gentle take shape on the page.