What Watercolor Journal Easy Actually Is
It's a simplified system for doing watercolor sketches in a small notebook without needing professional-grade materials. You buy a set of supplies, follow a step-by-step process, and end up with something that looks like you spent years learning this. Most people pick it up because traditional watercolor teaching is brutal — it assumes you have a studio, expensive paper, and three months to waste on practice sheets before you paint anything real. I ran into a problem with this method during my third project where I used the recommended 140lb cold-pressed paper with a cheap student-grade palette. The colors came out muddy on the second layer every time. What I found was that the pigment load in budget pans is inconsistent across brands, so mixing blue with yellow wouldn't give you green, it would give you something brownish. My workaround was swapping to a single tube of cadmium yellow and using just three base colors instead of the full set. That cut the muddiness out completely and the process went from about 45 minutes per sketch down to roughly 20 minutes.
Getting Started with Watercolor Journal Easy
You need four things: a hardbound sketchbook, a small travel watercolor set, two round brushes (sizes 6 and 2), and a cheap plastic water cup. That's it. The sketchbook is the part most people get wrong because they grab any notebook they find. The paper needs to be at least 140lb (300gsm) cold-pressed. Anything lighter will buckle and warp the moment wet paint hits it, which ruins the whole process within five minutes. The process starts with a light graphite sketch. Keep it loose. You're not making a technical drawing, you're laying down guide lines. Then you apply the first wash — a thin, watery layer of your lightest color across the areas that will be the background. Let it dry completely before touching it again. This is where patience matters. If you add a second layer too soon, the colors will lift and turn gray. Drying time varies from 8 to 15 minutes depending on humidity and how much water you're using. From there you build darker values. Add midtones, then the darkest accents last. The darkest parts should be nearly opaque, almost like you're using gouache. That contrast between the translucent washes and the dense darks is what makes the painting look finished rather than unfinished.
The Details That Actually Matter
Most beginners skip the brush maintenance part. Your size 2 brush will fray within a week if you leave it soaking in the water cup. Rinse it between colors, squeeze out excess water on a paper towel, and reshape the tip with your finger before setting it down. A properly shaped brush makes fine details possible. A frayed one turns everything into a blur. Another thing nobody tells you: the amount of water you put on the palette matters more than the paint quality. Two drops of water per pan is usually enough. More water and you're just painting with colored tea. Less water and the pigment won't release from the pan properly. I learned this the hard way when I started with a nearly dry pan and wasted an entire page trying to get saturation out of it. The journal format itself has a real advantage that people don't always consider. Because the pages are small — usually 5x7 or 6x9 inches — you're forced to simplify your composition. You can't do grand landscapes or complex figures in that space. That constraint actually improves your work because it teaches you to focus on one or two elements per page instead of cluttering everything. A well-composed simple sketch looks better than a crowded detailed one.
Get the Full Details
There are scenarios where this method doesn't work well. If you want loose, wet-on-wet abstract work, the step-by-step approach feels restrictive and slow. The method is designed for controlled, deliberate painting, not expressive splashing. In those cases, a larger pad of 300gsm hot-pressed paper and a more free-form technique will give you better results. You'd also run into trouble if you live in a very humid climate. Drying times double, and the paper stays damp long enough that accidental smudges become almost unavoidable. The biggest downside is probably the cost per square inch of finished art. A decent travel watercolor set runs about $25 to $40, a sketchbook is another $15 to $25, and brushes add another $10 to $20. For the amount of paint you get, you're paying a premium compared to buying full-size pans or tubes separately. But the convenience factor — having everything in one small kit that fits in a backpack — offsets that for most people who use it on the go. If you want to download instructions or get the full kit breakdown, the official Watercolor Journal Easy resource is available through their website at watercolorjournalearsy.com. The PDF guide covers about twelve step-by-step projects with material lists for each one. It's free and takes about ten minutes to read through once.
What to Expect After You Start
Your first three sketches will probably look okay but not great. That's normal. By sketch four or five, you'll start noticing which colors mix well together and which ones fight each other. Your brush control improves after about eight to ten pages. After twenty pages you'll have a consistent rhythm and the process becomes something you can do in one sitting without thinking about it too much. The journal fills up faster than you'd expect, which is both the best and worst part of this approach.
