Watercolor Styles
Watercolor is the art of controlled spontaneity—where precise details balance fluid, expressive color blending. Understanding these techniques helps appreciate how they've been adapted in Waterlogue, which offers various styles inspired by traditional watercolor approaches.
Lost and found edges
Watercolor’s beauty comes from the contrast between sharp, defined areas and soft, blended regions. Artists call these “lost and found edges”—a key technique that draws attention to important elements while inviting viewers to fill in the less defined areas.
All Waterlogue styles use this approach by analyzing contrast and other cues.
Source: Tinrocket; Style: Vibrant
Focusing on what’s important
Watercolor artists strategically emphasize key elements while leaving others undefined, drawing the viewer’s eye to what matters most.
Waterlogue identifies important subjects—faces, people, focal points—and gives them extra attention through precise details, stronger contrast, and careful edge control.
Source: Aiony Haust, Unsplash; Style: Vibrant
Painting with the white of the paper
Preserving the white of the paper is a distinctive watercolor technique. Many traditional watercolorists carefully plan which areas to leave untouched.
In wet-on-wet painting, leaving white areas is essential. Waterlogue uses this approach, in which colors blend while still wet. The app preserves white spaces from the beginning—these untouched areas create sharp edges that define shapes and capture lighting highlights.
Source: Tinrocket; Style: Cutouts
Painting from light to dark
Another key aspect of wet-on-wet is painting from light to dark. As colors bleed over time, Waterlogue allows lighter, brighter colors to flow longer than dark colors. This controlled diffusion enhances the beauty of color blending while preventing the painting from becoming too dark or muddy.
Source: Tinrocket; Style: Streamlined
Drawing attention
Artists often combine drawing with watercolor—from light pencil marks to bold ink lines—to define key features. This mixed-media approach is common among botanical illustrators and urban sketchers, creating contrast between fluid paint and precise lines.
Waterlogue offers styles with varying degrees of these drawing effects, from subtle underdrawing to crisp defining lines.
Source: Tinrocket; Style: Streamlined
Paper effects
Waterlogue styles incorporate a variety of paper types that affect how colors blend and settle. Traditional options range from smooth “hot-pressed” to rough papers, where pigment pools in the textured valleys.
Some styles feature non-traditional elements, such as graph paper’s geometric precision contrasting with watercolor’s organic flow.
Source: Tinrocket; Style: “It’s Technical”