Did you ever wonder how you can make your watercolor painting more interesting? You're in the right place because you will learn two techniques that will make your painting look so much more interesting!

The technique you'll learn today is the double exposure technique! It involves combining two images or exposures to create one single image to tell a story in a unique way.

Don't worry, it's a lot easier to create than it might sound like!

The first thing to do is tape down your watercolor paper to prevent it from buckling. Now if you don't want to draw something freehand you'll need a template. I used a royalty free picture of a silhouette of a woman (link below) and traced the outlines with a regular watercolor pencil on my watercolor paper. (Since you can't erase the pencil lines once you painted them over with you watercolors I recommend to lightly erase the lines.)

I decided to create a light colored background first, but you don't have to do that.

Now back to the double exposure technique!

Treat your silhouette as the main area you are going to paint in. For my painting I wanted to create something inspired by the negative painting technique I was using a while ago.

I sketched out some big leafs, a flower and oranges to make the inside of the painting look like it is a part of the women (Oranges as her cheek and shoulder). But you can paint whatever you want to make your watercolor painting look more interesting.

With the negative painting technique inside the silhouette you don't paint the object itself but rather the outside area around it.

Watch me painting and going more into detail on these two techniques to make your painting more interesting in my video below.

Here you'll find the silhouette template.

And here's a full list of all the other supplies I used in my video:

Links marked with an asterisk are affiliate links! This means I get a very small commission that may benefit me financially if you buy one of the products mentioned here!