How to Create Abstract Watercolour Pebbles

You will also need salt and washing up liquid for this project.

First, decide on your composition. I drew my pebbles out with a hard pencil on the Winsor and Newton watercolour pad, just to give myself an idea how the overall piece will look.

Tip: Make sure to use a high quality pad like the one mentioned above and have a quality set of brushes.

Next, I covered a brush in washing up liquid. This will protect the brush from the masking fluid medium and allow you to clean the brush easily after use.

Paint around the outside of each pebble with the masking fluid.

Wipe the masking fluid off your brush with a tissue, then wash it with soap.

Now chose where you want to have white biomorphic stripes in your pebbles and use the masking fluid to mask out those areas.

Then you need to let the masking fluid dry, it shifts to translucent.

Once the masking fluid is dry, you can start to add watercolour.

From the Winsor and Newton Cotman Watercolour palette, you can create some amazing colours because the paints are carefully chosen to work well when mixing new colours.

I used turquoise (mix of mixed titanium white, ultramarine and viridian) and orange (mix of yellow and pale red hue) as a base layer, before painting on more masking fluid.

Remember it doesn't matter if you go over the lines because it's protected by the masking fluid.

Whilst those two pebbles were drying, I mixed up a Paynes grey using ivory black, ultramarine and a touch of white. Payne's grey is a dark blue grey colour used in painting, it can be used as a mixer in place of black.

I chose the pebble I wanted darker and put a wash of water over it, then slowly dropped some of the Paynes grey onto the wet surface.

With the Paynes grey I already mixed, I covered another pebble but this time sprinkled salt onto the surface after I painted it. This will give it a mottled effect. Any salt is fine to use, just remember the size of the granules will determine your marks.

Now repeat step three on the dried turquoise and vivid orange. I've gone for some really abstract patterns that have little resemblance to the natural patterns in the pebbles.

When the masking fluid is dry, paint over the turquoise with Paynes Grey and the orange with Alizarin Crimson.

Throughout this project, I used the wet into wet technique; I washed each pebble with only water on the brush, then dropped in watercolour paint with a smaller brush.

You can mix some amazing colours with the Winsor and Newton Cotman Watercolour set. Try mixing a deep teal using Ivory black, viridian and ultramarine which I used against cadmium yellow and red. You could also try mixing a light turquoise with lots of titanium white, viridian green and ultramarine.

The last step is the most fun! Rub off the masking fluid with your finger, a cloth or an eraser to reveal your painterly pebbles.

The perfect reminder of your summer holiday.