Foundations
Letting Water Lead
The first track. Water first, pigment second, drawing never.
5 lessonsBeginner1 free
See the lessonsThis is a live Site & Rise template —Back to templates
An online school for loose watercolour
Stop fighting the water.
Start painting with it.
Wet-in-wet watercolour taught the way it actually behaves — fast, unrepeatable, and half out of your hands. 15 filmed lessons, a live session every month, and a critique wall where somebody tells you the truth about your edges.
Cancel in two clicks, any time. One free lesson in every track, no card needed.
Lesson 03 · The wet edge
Letting Water Lead
3 / 5Up next — Drying Time as a Material. Twenty-four minutes, and a chart you’ll keep for years.
- 2,140
- Members painting
- 15
- Lessons, no filler
- 1st Sun
- Live session, monthly
- 48hr
- Critique turnaround
How we teach
Four opinions we won’t
be talked out of
Every course here follows from these. If you disagree with all four, you'll have a bad time — and there are gentler schools out there that will teach you to render a rose petal for nine hours.
01
The paper is a participant
You are not painting on a surface, you are painting into one. How much water the sheet is already holding decides more about the mark than your brush does. We teach you to read the sheen before you teach you to hold the brush.
02
A bloom is information
The cauliflower edge that appears when you touch a damp wash is the most-hated accident in watercolour and one of its best marks. We spend a whole lesson causing them deliberately until they stop being accidents.
03
Six pigments is plenty
A forty-pan set is a way to avoid learning colour. Two blues, two reds, two yellows, and everything you will ever paint is in there. The constraint is the curriculum.
04
Stop early, and stop out loud
Almost every painting that dies in this medium dies from a fourth pass. We teach stopping as a skill with its own tells, not as a personality trait you either have or don't.
The curriculum
Three tracks, fifteen lessons, no filler
About 6 hours of filmed teaching in total. Each track is sequenced — lesson four assumes lesson three — and the first lesson of every track is free to watch without an account.
Colour
Six Pigments, One Landscape
Why your greens look like plastic, and the six tubes that fix it.
5 lessonsIntermediate1 free
See the lessonsIllustration
Ink, Then Water
Line and wash, reportage speed, on location or at the table.
5 lessonsAny level1 free
See the lessonsAnneke VossPort Townsend, WA
Who's teaching
Eleven years painting buildings that didn’t exist, then a hard stop
Anneke spent eleven years as an architectural illustrator, painting buildings that did not exist yet for developers who wanted every window counted. She was very good at it and it nearly ended her relationship with painting. She quit in 2016, moved to a house on the water in Port Townsend, and spent two years relearning watercolour by deliberately doing everything her old job had trained out of her: no drawing first, no correcting, no second pass.
Wet Edge came out of that. Anneke teaches the way she paints now — fast, wet, decisive, and comfortable with the parts that go wrong. Her work has shown at the Northwest Watercolor Society annual and she was a signature-status juror there in 2023 and 2024.
- Signature member, Northwest Watercolor Society
- Juror, NWWS Waterworks annual — 2023, 2024
- Eleven years as an architectural illustrator (recovering)
- Teaching watercolour since 2017
Members
What actually changed for them
Every one of these is a specific claim about a specific painting habit. We've left off the ones that just said the course was great, because those don't help you decide.
“I had eight years of tight, careful, joyless botanical work behind me and I could not loosen up no matter how many people told me to. What finally did it was Anneke's second lesson — being made to ruin four washes on purpose. I have not drawn a pencil outline since February.”
Sold nine paintings at her first open studio
Priya RaghunathanMember since 2023 · Sheffield, UK
“The critique wall is the part I'd pay for on its own. Anneke told me my values were fine and my edges were the problem, which nobody had ever said to me in ten years of local classes, and it was true, and it took about three weeks to fix once I knew.”
Now moderates the Wednesday critique queue
Desmond AchebeMember since 2022 · Atlanta, GA
“I joined during a bad winter mostly to have something to do on Sundays. The live sessions turned out to be the only two hours a week I wasn't thinking about work. The painting improved as a side effect, honestly.”
Painted 40 Sundays in a row
Ruth EllingerMember since 2024 · Duluth, MN
“The six-pigment thing sounded like a gimmick until I did the greens lesson and realised every green I'd ever squeezed out of a tube was the reason my landscapes looked like plastic. I gave away half my paints.”
Down from 31 tubes to 6
Tomás IriarteMember since 2023 · Valparaíso, Chile
The first lesson of every track is free. Start there.
Three free lessons, no card, no trial countdown. If the way we teach doesn't suit you, you'll know inside twenty minutes and you'll have lost nothing.