Working with bleeds in watercolor

A bleed in watercolor is when your paintbrush touches an area that is still wet on your painting, and the color from your brush bleeds into the wet area.

Bleeds can be a fun way to use the natural unpredictable characteristics of watercolor, but bleeds can be frustrating when they happen on accident. In this post, I’ll give some tips on avoiding bleeds, how to use them in your watercolor paintings, and how to fix them if one happens on accident.

How to avoid bleeds

Since a bleed occurs when your wet brush touches a wet area on your painting, the key to avoiding a bleed is to make sure your brush does not touch a wet area on your painting. Simple, right? Considering how often bleeds happen, it’s easier said than done. Especially when you want to keep painting and don’t feel like sitting around watching paint dry. But there are a couple of things you can do to increase success in avoiding bleeds.

First, if you really want to start painting next to an area that is still wet, make sure you leave a thin white line between the two areas. The trick with this is to make the separation between the two areas as thin as possible so it’s not noticeable. However, the closer you get, the more you risk accidentally touching the two areas together. Be slow and careful.

Second, if you really want to avoid bleeds at all costs, let an area completely dry before painting next to it. And I mean completely dry. Sometimes an area of a painting looks dry but is still a little damp. Stop what you’re doing, get a snack, and then come back. Or use a heat tool to dry the painting faster. But make sure it’s dry!

How to use bleeds

Bleeds can be a lot of fun and add character to a painting. Bleeds are one of the unpredictable things in watercolor that makes watercolor so interesting.

You can cause a bleed on purpose by touching up against a still wet area while you’re painting. Let the colors flow and see what interesting patterns occur.

Try this when painting flowers. Paint two different colored flowers close together and let them touch and run into each other. When painting a flower, paint the stem and touch the flower with the stem while it’s still wet. The green will run a bit into the flower and give an interesting and natural effect.

A bleed can also add an extra organic effect to a loose painting. In this painting of a cactus, from a Let’s Make Art tutorial, I touched too close to my still wet flowers while painting the background. As a result, the magenta bled into the blue and created some neat shapes.

How to fix bleeds

If you get a bleed, first consider leaving it. Sometimes a bleed can be a happy accident that adds to your painting. But it could also be something that you really don’t want in your painting.

If you get an accidental bleed, there are a few things you can do. The key is to act quickly.

First, grab a paper towel or dry brush (whatever you can grab quickly) and use it to mop up the color. You can use the brush to try to push back the color into the space where you want it.

If there is still color where you don’t want it, use a clean damp brush to gently lift out the color as much as you can. Just be careful to not overwork the paper.

After lifting the color, you may need to redo the area that the color bled into. Wait until after the painting has completely dried to make corrections, in order to avoid another accidental bleed. Once it’s dry and before you make corrections, if there’s still color that needs to be lifted, you can try gently using a magic eraser to rub the color of the paper. Just be careful, as this can damage the paper if you are not careful.

If everything fails, remember that it’s just a piece of paper and you can always throw it away and try again.