Have you ever finished a watercolor painting, felt pretty good about it...and then wondered what on earth you were supposed to do with it? Because I don't need another practice painting of a leaf.
If I'm going to spend an afternoon painting something, I'd love to end up with a piece I might actually frame and hang in my kitchen. That was the idea behind this collection. I wanted easy watercolor painting ideas that were interesting enough to paint, forgiving enough to actually finish, and charming enough to become kitchen art when you're done.
So instead of the usual flowers, mountains, and obligatory bowl of fruit, we're painting things with a little more character.
An old hand-crank egg beater. Mismatched apothecary spice jars. A vintage flour sack. An antique kitchen scale. A crock of pickles. A sardine tin. Even that slightly unruly drawer where all the baking things seem to multiply when you're not looking.
Some are nostalgic. Some are a little odd. All of them belong in a kitchen, which means when you finish one you don't have to wonder where you're going to put it.
And don't let the more detailed ones scare you off. You don't have to draw everything from scratch. I've also got free printable watercolor templates you can use when you'd rather skip the drawing and get to the paint.
So pick the one you'd actually like to see hanging in your kitchen, pull out your watercolors, and let's paint something worth framing.
What Makes an Interesting Watercolor Subject?
I'm a three-dimensional artist first, so I tend to look at things in terms of form and texture. I notice the curve of a handle, the ridges in an artichoke, the crumple of an old paper sack, the gears on an egg beater, or the way light catches the edge of a glass bottle. That's probably why I was drawn to these particular watercolor subjects.
They're full of good lines and interesting surfaces. Worn wood. Wrinkled paper. Tarnished metal. Transparent glass. Chipped enamel. Handwritten labels. The folds of a kitchen towel. None of it has to be perfect, either. In fact, a little age and imperfection usually gives us more to paint.
I also like objects with a strong form. If you can recognize an old kitchen scale or a crock from its silhouette, you already have a wonderful foundation for a painting. The color and details can come later.
Some of these ideas look complicated to draw, especially things like the egg beater and cherry pitter. Don't let that be the reason you skip them.
You can begin with a prepared sketch and concentrate on the watercolor itself; where the light falls, which edges you want to keep, where the colors mingle, and how much of that wonderful texture you actually need to "describe" in paint. That's one of the reasons I like using watercolor templates sometimes. The drawing gives you the structure. What happens once you pick up the brush is still completely yours. Plus, drawing is not my strong suit.
1. Paint a Row of Mismatched Vintage Spice Jars
Instead of a perfectly coordinated modern spice rack, imagine a little collection assembled over many years - green glass, clear glass, an amber apothecary bottle, a squat jar with a wire closure, cork stoppers, handwritten paper labels.
Then fill them with ingredients that are visually interesting in their own right: cloves, rosemary, cinnamon sticks, nutmeg, thyme, oregano, sage.
Suddenly you're not painting seven bottles. You're painting seven tiny still lifes.
This is also a wonderful watercolor exercise because the materials behave so differently. The transparent glass needs restraint. The amber bottle needs richer color. Cinnamon and cloves introduce warm browns, while rosemary and sage keep the palette from becoming too warm.
What to practice: transparent glass, reflections, lettering, dried herbs, warm and cool neutrals.
Make it your own: If you have old spice jars, medicine bottles, preserving jars, or little bottles you've picked up at antique shops, line up your own collection and photograph it. Don't worry about matching bottles. The mismatched ones are more interesting.
2. Paint an Old Hand-Crank Egg Beater
Now we're getting into the peculiar things.
An old-fashioned egg beater is almost ridiculously interesting once you stop thinking of it as a kitchen utensil and start looking at it as a collection of shapes.
There are gears, loops, screws, long metal stems, a wooden crank and handle. Add a little batter clinging to the beaters and suddenly the whole thing feels like it has just been set down in the middle of making a cake.
The drawing can look intimidating. The painting doesn't have to be.
Once the outline is in place, you can let watercolor do much of the work. A few rusty browns, muted blue-grays and warm wood tones can suggest decades of wear without meticulously painting every scratch.
What to practice: aged metal, wood grain, negative spaces and small mechanical details.
Don't overwork it: You don't need to describe every piece of metal equally. Choose a few crisp edges and let other areas soften or disappear. Your eye will fill in more than you think.
3. Paint the Baking Drawer
This idea turns something completely ordinary into a painting. Open the drawer where you keep the baking odds and ends. Maybe there are nested measuring cups, a wooden spoon, cookie cutters, cupcake papers, an old whisk, a spatula, a bottle of vanilla and a dish towel that somehow ended up in there too.
Don't clean it up too much.
The crumbs, dusting of flour, stained paper liners and slightly battered tools are what give this kind of painting its charm.
A bird's-eye composition works especially well because all of those individual objects become simple shapes arranged inside the rectangle of the drawer.
What to practice: composition, overlapping shapes, metal, wood, fabric and lots of little textures.
Try this: Before rearranging anything, take a photograph of your own drawer exactly as you found it. Accidental compositions are often much more interesting than carefully styled ones.
4. Paint a Carton of Farm-Fresh Eggs
Eggs are hardly an unusual painting subject, but a carton of naturally colorful farm eggs is different.
A friend of mine got chickens last year and deliberately chose several different breeds. Partly because she wanted a beautiful flock, but also because they'd lay different colored eggs.
Now she gives me eggs from her farm and opening the carton makes me smile every time. Pale blue-green, speckled brown, warm cream and soft peach - they look like Easter eggs without anyone having to dye a thing.
They're also wonderful to paint. Tuck those soft colors into a rough gray-brown cardboard carton, add a broken shell or an old egg cup, and suddenly you have much more than a study of an egg.
This is a forgiving watercolor subject, too. Eggs don't need fussy detail. Their form comes mostly from soft shadows and subtle shifts in color.
What to practice: rounded forms, soft shadows, subtle color changes and rough cardboard texture.
Color idea: Don't automatically reach for gray when painting a pale egg. Cream, pale blue, soft violet, ochre and reflected color will make those shells much more interesting.
5. Paint an Old Flour Sack and Wooden Scoop
There is something beautiful about old packaging.
Before everything came in glossy plastic, everyday pantry goods arrived in paper sacks, tins, jars and printed boxes. Those packages weren't intended to become art, which may be precisely why they're so appealing to paint now. Try an old-fashioned flour sack with a simple mill illustration, faded lettering and a wooden scoop spilling flour across the table. The wrinkled paper is the interesting part.
Let the bag sag. Let the top fold unevenly. Add creases and worn corners. Allow some of the lettering to disappear into those folds.
What to practice: lettering, folded paper, warm whites, wood and loose granular texture.
A little trick for lettering: Paint the package first and save the lettering until later. You don't need every letter to be mechanically perfect. Slight irregularity often makes a vintage label more convincing.
6. Paint an Antique Kitchen Scale
An old kitchen scale has many great elements that make a good watercolor subject.
Beautiful geometry. Chipped enamel. Tarnished metal. An aged cream dial. Tiny numbers and markings. And just enough imperfection to keep it from feeling sterile.
I especially like the idea of putting a single egg in the tray.
That's all it needs.
The simple egg against all that mechanical detail gives the eye somewhere to rest.
If your scale is painted an old faded green, blue or cream, don't try to make the color perfectly even. Drop warmer and cooler pigments into it while the paint is damp. A little variation helps create that worn enamel appearance.
What to practice: symmetry, aged enamel, rust, metal and restrained detail.
Remember: You don't have to paint every number on the dial. A few well-placed marks can convince the eye that the rest are there.
7. Paint a Pickling Crock Full of Cucumbers
This one makes me think of late summer.
A big old stoneware crock. Cucumbers tucked into brine. Feathery dill spilling over the top. A bulb of garlic nearby. Maybe a blue-striped kitchen towel draped casually over the rim.
It's colorful without being bright, seasonal without becoming holiday decor, and nostalgic without trying too hard.
The cucumbers also give you an excuse to mix several beautiful greens. Olive, sap, yellow-green, blue-green. Let them mingle instead of trying to mix one perfect "cucumber green."
What to practice: greens, ceramic texture, botanical details, fabric folds and loose wet-on-wet color.
Look for contrast: The tiny, delicate dill heads are especially lovely against the heavy shape of the crock.
8. Paint a Vintage Cherry Pitter
If you've never seen an old cherry pitter before, it looks a little like something invented in a workshop rather than a kitchen.
The long handle, spring, plunger and worn metal base make a wonderful collection of mechanical shapes. Then place a few glossy red cherries beside it and everything comes alive.
This is a good example of why I love looking beyond conventional subjects. A cherry is pretty. A strange old machine designed specifically to remove the pit from a cherry is memorable.
What to practice: metal, strong darks, shiny fruit, reflected color and contrasting textures.
Composition idea: Don't center everything. Let the cherry pitter dominate the composition and scatter two or three cherries loosely beside it.
9. Paint an Open Tin of Sardines
Hear me out. A sardine tin is a terrific watercolor subject. You have the shiny metal rim, that wonderful rolled-back lid, silvery fish packed closely together, tiny highlights on the oil and often a beautifully designed paper label.
It's a little odd, which is what makes it interesting.
Watercolor is particularly good at suggesting reflective surfaces because you can leave small pieces of white paper untouched and let them become your brightest highlights.
What to practice: reflective metal, silvery grays, highlights, repeated shapes and packaging details.
Don't reach immediately for black: Mix your fishy grays from blues, browns and muted violets. They'll feel much livelier than flat gray paint.
10. Paint a Beautiful Old Tea Tin
Old tins are tiny pieces of graphic design history.
Tea tins in particular can have wonderful typography, borders, botanical illustrations and slightly faded colors. They also tend to acquire dents, scratches and worn edges over the years, which only makes them more interesting. If you have an old tin in a cupboard, pull it out.
Or look through antique shops and flea markets for inspiration. You don't have to reproduce every bit of decoration. Simplify the pattern and concentrate on the character of the object.
What to practice: typography, pattern, metallic edges, faded color and controlled detail.
Make it personal: A tin inherited from your mother or grandmother would make an especially meaningful subject. Paint the actual dents and wear instead of correcting them. That's part of its story.
11. Paint an Artichoke
I'm ending with something from the garden because an artichoke is one of those objects that becomes stranger the longer you look at it. It's almost architectural. Each leaf overlaps the next, the greens shift toward violet and gray in the shadows, and the entire vegetable is made from a repeating pattern that looks much more complicated than it really is.
Instead of outlining and painting every leaf separately, begin by looking for the largest light and dark shapes. Let neighboring colors touch and mingle. Save a handful of crisp edges for the leaves closest to you.
What to practice: layered shapes, lost and found edges, greens, violet shadows and simplifying a complicated subject.
If detail makes you nervous: Squint at your reference. Seriously. The small details disappear and the larger value shapes become much easier to see.
Free Printable Watercolor Templates: Skip the Drawing and Start Painting
Here's the truth: drawing is not my strong suit. I'm primarily a three-dimensional artist, and give me clay and I'm perfectly happy. Put a pencil in my hand and things get a little more questionable.
I'm learning watercolor because I enjoy it. Color blending is probably my strongest skill, and I'd much rather spend my painting time working on color, shadows, texture, and getting better with a brush than struggling to draw the whole thing first.
That's why I love starting with a sketch.
A printable watercolor template gives me a good foundation to work from while I practice the part I'm actually trying to improve - painting. I can transfer the sketch to watercolor paper, change the colors, simplify things, add details, and make plenty of mistakes without also worrying about whether my egg beater looks remotely like an egg beater.
And I'm trying to be a little more intentional about what I paint, too. I've already made my share of paintings that were fun to do but left me wondering what on earth to do with them afterward. Tony the goat lived in my bathroom for entirely too long for exactly this reason.
So these days, I like starting with a sketch of something I'd actually enjoy painting and might want to keep when I'm finished.
If that sounds good to you too, I've put together a free collection of printable watercolor sketches. Pick one you like, transfer it to your paper, and get to the fun part.
How to Find More Unusual Things to Paint With Watercolor
You don't need an antique kitchen to keep going with this idea. Once you start looking at ordinary objects as potential paintings, you'll see subjects everywhere. Open drawers and look at the things sitting on the back of the pantry shelf. Notice what you've kept even though you don't really use it anymore. Look inside your sewing room, garden shed, china cabinet or junk drawer.
The old wooden-handled scissors you've had for thirty years may be more interesting than a perfectly arranged bouquet. So might a stack of handwritten recipe cards tied with string. Or your mother's rolling pin. Or the battered metal biscuit cutter that comes out every Christmas. Or a row of canning jars cooling on a towel.
A good watercolor subject doesn't have to be important. Sometimes painting it is what makes you realize that it was.
Watercolor Painting Ideas FAQ
What should I paint when I don't know what to paint?
Start with objects you already have rather than searching for the perfect watercolor reference. Look for an object with an interesting silhouette, texture or story - an old kitchen tool, jar, tin, piece of fruit, crockery, sewing notion or garden tool. Limiting yourself to things within one room can actually make choosing a subject easier.
What are some unusual things to paint with watercolor?
Old tools and everyday household objects make surprisingly interesting watercolor subjects. Try vintage kitchen utensils, spice bottles, food packaging, old tins, drawers filled with small objects, preserving jars, mechanical tools, crockery or inherited household pieces. Objects with glass, metal, paper, wood or worn surfaces give you interesting watercolor textures to explore.
What are some easy watercolor painting ideas for beginners?
Beginners often do well with subjects made from recognizable, simple shapes. Eggs, jars, fruit, bottles, tins and crockery are good places to start. If the drawing itself is complicated, use a printable watercolor sketch or traceable outline so you can concentrate on learning watercolor techniques rather than trying to master drawing at the same time.
Do I need to know how to draw before I learn watercolor?
No. Drawing is helpful, but you don't have to master drawing before you can enjoy watercolor painting. You can work from a simple sketch, transfer an outline onto watercolor paper or trace a template and concentrate on painting skills first. Your drawing skills can develop separately if and when you want them to.
Is it okay to trace a watercolor sketch?
Absolutely. A transferred sketch is simply a tool for getting your composition onto the paper. The creative decisions don't stop there. You still choose the palette, values, brushwork, edges, textures, level of detail and overall feeling of the finished painting.
Where can I find free printable watercolor templates?
I have a free collection of printable watercolor sketches created so you can skip the pressure of drawing and get to the painting. You can use the outline as a starting point, transfer it to watercolor paper, and then choose your own colors and painting style.
How do I choose a good watercolor reference image?
Look for a reference with a clear light source, recognizable shapes and a useful range of light and dark values. Don't worry about finding a photograph you can reproduce perfectly. A reference is there to give you information. You can simplify distracting details, change colors, move objects or combine ideas from your own surroundings to create a painting that feels like yours.
Look Around Your Own Kitchen
I hope these watercolor painting ideas have you looking at your kitchen a little differently, because creative inspiration is often much closer than we think.
It might be the chipped crock you've had forever. The little tin you couldn't bring yourself to throw away. The odd kitchen gadget you inherited and aren't entirely sure how to use. The recipe box with your mother's handwriting inside. Those things aren't as obvious as a vase of flowers and that's what makes them worth painting.
Choose one that catches your attention, make yourself a cup of tea, pull out your paints, and see what happens.