Watercolor Mindfulness: Paint Yourself Calm

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Change your mood and lift your spirits with the simple joy of color. Jean Haines guides you through simple relaxation techniques and painting exercises to help you let go of stress.

Sometimes painting isn’t so much about the finished product, but how it makes you feel. One of our most popular and inspiring watercolor instructors, Jean Haines has often reflected on the value of art as way of coping with the stresses and challenges of life.

“Art is my yoga,” she says. “I relax when a brush is in my hand. I have daily exercises using colour to lift my mood, energize me, or simply make me feel great. Colour is so therapeutic. The action of pigment with water can affect the mind and body in ways we really could find hard to comprehend unless we have felt the very same amazing benefits.”

The following watercolor tips and techniques will show you how to paint with a purpose—to reach a state of calm or energy simply by moving your paintbrush.

“So many people are worried about painting purely because they put such high expectations on their shoulders of having to achieve a masterpiece. Actually, painting can be such a joy…just to watch color flowing over paper, to de-stress, and to just literally change your mood.” —Jean Haines

Exercise 1: Relax with a Waterfall of Washes

Choose relaxing greens, blues, and violets, and start by putting a row of solid colors on the top of the page. These blocks represent any problems or worries you might be having.

As you add water and let the colors flow down the paper, imagine all those troubles washing away. The goal is to enjoy what’s happening with the pigment as you create a beautiful soft abstract.

“Really, it’s not what you’re painting. It’s how you feel when you’re painting.” ~Jean Haines

Exercise 2: Flow with Color

Take out a new sheet of paper and choose your favorite color from the previous exercise. Wet the paper first so you can control exactly where you want the color to go. Touch the color to the wet paper wherever you want to see a color burst, and focus on how you feel when the color starts to run.

You can drop more water on top, draw the color out to the dry areas, or add more color where you’d like it. Think about how you’re moving your arm, and try moving in different ways to get abstract patterns.

“Don’t worry about what’s going to happen with this paper when you’re finished with it. It’s not a frameable painting,” says Haines. “It’s purely about learning and looking at these gorgeous color patterns…if you see an area that’s beautiful, leave it. If you see an area that’s boring, just throw some water on it.”

Exercise 3: Find Positive in the Negative

Start with a clean sheet of paper, and in the center of the paper, leave an area white. Think about this area as representing a problem, as large or as small as you like. It could be a flower, the sail of a boat, or any white shape. Think about that shape and paint around it, creating a negative edge.

After that edge dries, which should happen fairly quickly, start letting color flow around it. The edge will stop the color from running into the white space. If you like, you can make the problem disappear entirely by painting into the white space, as Jean has done below.

“I’m just going to leave my problem [sitting] there, and I’m going to focus on everything going on around the problem, which is a much better way to be,” says Haines. “This area is the positivity, the positive side of the painting…you can forget your problems when you’re painting, and that’s not a bad thing.”