August 2, 2026
How to find your watercolor style by knowing what you don't want
You don't find your watercolor style by knowing what you want, and you don't find it by copying someone else's tutorials. I found mine by looking at the moments that showed me what I didn't want to experience again, in my life and in my painting. Those defining moments create a fork: you don't know exactly where the new path leads, but you know exactly what you are moving away from.
Why doesn't copying someone else's techniques give you a style?
When we talk about watercolor style, the first question is usually "what do you want to do?" I want a loose style. I want to paint gorgeous skies in watercolor. Of course, we all want that. But how do you get there? You don't know.
You can create a fantasy that has nothing to do with reality, with what you experience in real life. When you try to mimic or replicate someone else's techniques, you don't know if you are going to love it, because what you want is the outcome.
I didn't find my watercolor style by trying to imitate someone else. It doesn't work when you try to follow someone else's path, because:
- you don't have their life experience
- you don't have their skills
- you are going to run into issues they never had
- you are going to overcome issues they had, but that you will never face
When I started, I saw beautiful watercolors from very famous painters like Joseph Zbukvic, Thomas Schaller and Alvaro Castagnet. I couldn't paint like them. But I could ask myself what I didn't want to experience in watercolor again.
What are defining moments and why do they matter?
Someone once asked me what really happened after my 15 years as an employee, when I decided to make a living from my passion, watercolor. I was about to give the socially accepted answer: I wanted to live another life. He stopped me. He wanted the real truth, the raw thing.
The real truth is that I didn't quit to live from my passion. There were moments in my life when I realized that something was missing, something was off. It could be very trivial. I could see myself walking around the office, and a thought crossed my mind: I don't want to be here. And it was even stronger than that: I don't want this life. I don't want to talk to my colleagues, I'm a lone wolf. I don't want to wake up at 6 a.m. to do everything that fits society's standards.
I call those moments defining moments. They don't define what you want. Moments that show you what you really want are quite rare. You can be on vacation and life is perfect, but it's not what you really want: sometimes it's just compensation, a kind of relief. Finding what I really wanted was a real struggle for me.
But the moments when you realize "this is something I don't want," even if they last only a few seconds, define what you don't want. When I quit my job, I didn't consciously list each of those moments. Looking back, they played a huge role in the decision: I didn't want to live them anymore.
What happens once you make the decision?
When you make the decision, you craft another way into your life. You have the life defined by the standards of society, and you have another path created by your decision. On this other path, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. But I knew exactly what I didn't want to experience again.
You craft your life without knowing exactly what you are going to craft, but you know exactly what you are going to avoid. In watercolor, it's exactly the same.
You then have 2 options:
- Stay quiet and live the way society wants you to live. This is when you mimic someone else, when you copy the watercolor tutorials. It's exactly the same pattern: you follow someone else's path, you end up in a place where you don't want to be, and you repeat this cycle again and again.
- Realize that every single time, in this moment and that one, you were in the wrong place, and decide not to live it again. From that moment, you open a door where you can find your own style, whether it's your lifestyle or your watercolor style.
How did this change the way I paint and teach?
For a year, I did lives with my students based on watercolors I had already painted. I showed them how to replicate the painting with specific techniques: how to make the sea, the waves, the sand, the rocks. I split a painting into small exercises so they could put all the pieces together and create the whole painting. People loved this concept, and the students got great results.
But after 40 or 50 lives like that, I couldn't stand it anymore. I was forcing myself to teach techniques. Yes, it could help people, but I wasn't having fun anymore. I didn't want to share my techniques anymore, I wanted to create something. I could have kept doing those lives for years to make a living from my passion, but what matters most is what you experience emotionally.
That was another fork. Your style, not only in watercolor but in how you lead your life, evolves over time.
Now, during my lives, I take my students' photos and I tell them: "I don't know if I'm going to succeed, I don't know if I'm going to fail, but let's try to interpret this photo in watercolor." With some photos, I really didn't know if it would work. We tried, and in the end the students told me it was beautiful. What excites me is that I don't know what I'm going to come up with. I don't feel like I'm repeating myself, or that I'm in already conquered territory. Every single topic is completely new.
How did I find my loose style?
What I couldn't stand was going too much into the details. Once I realized that, I did everything I could to learn how to paint in a loose way, and I didn't follow any tutorials to do it. Going too much into the details was so painful that at one point I decided to move forward and create my own path, even though I didn't know where I was going to land.
It's not about a watercolor technique and it's not about composition. Finding your own watercolor style means going back to the moments when you realized you didn't want this life, or this watercolor practice, anymore. Then you look for another solution, and that opens the door to crafting your own path. This is exactly what I teach my students, and it's why I'm not into watercolor tutorials.
FAQ
Do I need to know what I want to find my watercolor style?
No. When I started watercolor, I didn't know what I wanted. I only knew what I wanted to avoid: being like everyone else, being just another employee in a huge company.
Can watercolor tutorials help me find my style?
Not on their own. Copying tutorials is the same pattern as living the way others expect: it leads you to a place you don't want to be, until you decide to stop repeating it.
How do I know what to move away from?
Listen to yourself: do I like this or not, do I want to experience this again or not? For me, it was repeating myself and going too much into the details.
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Discover The Loose Watercolor System