Lately, when doing demonstrations or conducting workshop I get asked "how do you paint those wet street scenes" and "can you teach us how to paint them". That is exactly what happened this last weekend as I conducted a workshop for the Addison Art Guild. The video below is the lesson I gave the students and what we learned to paint.
To
create a wet street in watercolor the first thing you need to learn is how to paint wet-into-wet.
Painting wet-into-wet or what I like to call Floating-Your-Pigment teaches you to control your pigment.
You can create wet streets using soft and hard edges, but I like to teach it with soft edges first.
First, you wet the entire street with clear water, then do a gradation that usually goes from a light to dark and back to front. It is usually light
to dark and back to front but not always, sometimes depending on the scene it can be opposite with the back being dark and the front being light, either way, do a wet-into-wet gradation.
Second, you use the color of the gradation and darken that color slightly to paint in the reflections of objects on the street or sidewalk. Don't worry about what the color of the object will be above the reflection, you can add that color into the reflection later with a tint of
color over the soft edged reflections.
Keep the brush strokes of the reflection totally vertical, and they can be darker closer to the object that causes the reflection.
Don't confuse a shadow with the reflection, sometimes you can have both happening at the same time. You can see an example of this in the Prague Bridge painting below.
If you are looking to make the reflection hard-edged, just make sure you do it as a
tint of color and try not to make it too dark and make sure to use the color of the first wash but darkened slightly.
Give both ways a shot, I tend to use both ways in the same painting as illustrated in the painting above.
