What Baking a Cake Can Teach Us About Watercolor Practice

The Painting That Happens Before the Painting

If you've ever spent 10 or 15 minutes painting curved lines on scrap paper, mixing colors, or repeating the same simple wash over and over, you might have set your brush down with a silent little question: did that even count?

Here's what I'd love for you to notice first. Look at the page. There's a row of curved strokes. A handful of color swatches. A hand that moves a little surer than it did 15 minutes ago. You made something. It just isn't the kind of something you were taught to expect.

If that question feels familiar, this post is for you. After a few years of painting, teaching, and talking with beginner watercolorists, here's what I've come to believe: brushstroke drills, color tests, and quick practice sessions are real watercolor painting — and some of the most useful painting you can do, especially when your time comes in small pockets. 

Let me explain what I mean, starting with a cake. 🍰

What Baking a Cake Can Teach Us

Think about baking a cake. The finished cake is the obvious part — batter in the pan, into the oven, and done. But the real baking happens earlier, in the steps nobody frames a photo of. Creaming the butter and sugar until it's just right. Leveling off the flour. Greasing and flouring the pan so the cake actually comes out. Throw everything in the bowl at once without paying attention, and the cake won't turn out, no matter how pretty the pan looks.

The skill lives in those in-between steps. The measuring, the combining, the little signs you learn to look for: yes, the butter and sugar are creamed together properly; yes, the flour is leveled off. That's the part that really decides how the cake turns out.

Watercolor has its own in-between steps — loading your brush, controlling your water, mixing a color, planning a simple layout. And here's the lovely difference: with baking, you can't really practice creaming butter without committing to a whole cake. Watercolor lets you. You can practice the brushstrokes, test the colors, sketch two quick thumbnails — all on their own, before you ever start a "real" project.

Every one of those is painting. Paint on paper, a skill rehearsed, something made. That's a gift most mediums don't give you, and I think it's one of the best parts of learning watercolor.

And for watercolor beginners, these small practice sessions can be one of the simplest, clearest ways to build brush control, water awareness, and confidence.

Where the "Finished Piece" Feeling Comes From

If you've taken a watercolor class, watched tutorials, or followed a paint-along video, you've probably noticed a pattern: the goal is almost always a finished painting.

Paint a flower. Paint a landscape. Paint a bird. Follow the steps, and end up with something you can hold up and say, "I made this."

And there's nothing wrong with that. Finished paintings are wonderful — satisfying, motivating, a real part of why we fall in love with watercolor.

But when every session is aimed at a finished piece, a short practice session can start to feel like it doesn't measure up. You've got 15 minutes before dinner. You'd love to paint. But you know you can't finish a whole project in that time, so you don't start. Or you do start, spend 10 minutes on a brushstroke drill, and then set it down wondering whether it counted, because it didn't end in a painting you could frame.

I don't think that feeling comes from you. It comes from a definition of painting that was built for people with open calendars and big studio afternoons, not for a busy beginner fitting creativity into the margins of a full life.

At Mary Moreno Studio, I look at it a little differently.

A Drill Is a Small, Complete Thing

In a lot of watercolor teaching, brush-control exercises and single-skill drills get treated like the thing you do before the real painting starts. A warm-up stroke here, a practice swatch there, then on to the main event.

Here's another way to look at it. A drill is a small, complete piece of painting in its own right — paint on paper, a skill practiced, progress you can see.

Think about what's actually happening during a focused drill. Your brush is wet. Your hand is moving. Your brain is learning how water and pigment behave together on paper. You're solving small, real problems as you go — adjusting your water ratio, noticing how your brush angle changes the stroke, feeling the difference between damp and flooded. And at the end, there it is: a page with paint on it, and a skill that's a little stronger than it was.

Those are the very skills that make every finished painting possible. They're also worth doing, and worth finishing, all on their own.

A Simple Next Step

If focused practice feels like your kind of painting, the free Watercolor Brushstroke 3-Day Quickstart walks you through one foundational brushstroke — an easy, beginner-friendly introduction to building more consistent brushstrokes, one small session at a time.

Whenever you're ready, you can download the free Brushstroke 3-Day Quickstart here.

How Watercolor Skill Actually Builds

When I think back on how my own watercolor has grown, the biggest leaps didn't come from finishing paintings. They came from repetition.

My hand learned water control by making the same stroke dozens of times in a row, not from one careful flower on a Saturday afternoon. My eye learned color mixing by blending the same two pigments across different water ratios, a little at a time.

There's a reason for that.

The kind of skill your brush hand needs is built through repetition. Every time you load your brush and make a stroke, your hand is gathering information. How much water is in the belly? How much pressure makes this line width? What happens when the paper is damp instead of dry?

A single finished painting might touch a dozen techniques, but only lightly. A 10-minute drill on one skill gives your hand concentrated, uninterrupted practice — and that concentration is what builds muscle memory.

I've watched this happen in my own practice. After a few sessions working on thin-to-thick strokes, the next time I sat down to paint a flower, my petals felt more natural. My hand already knew the motion. I was painting the flower, but the drills did the teaching.

Three Small Finished Things to Practice

If that still feels a little abstract, let me make it concrete. Here are three focused sessions you can do in 10 minutes. Each one is quick, each one builds a real skill, and each one leaves you with something finished, even if it never becomes a framed painting. And here's a little secret: each one also subtly sets you up for a simple watercolor cake we'll paint together next week. More on that at the end :)

1. Brush Control Drill (10 minutes)

Wet a round brush, load it with one color, and spend the full 10 minutes painting curved lines on scrap paper. Crescents, S-curves, thin-to-thick transitions. Pay attention to your brush angle. Notice what happens when you press down versus when you lift. Watch how the line changes as the brush runs low on paint.

No subject, no composition — just a finished page of brush strokes and a hand that knows the brush a little better than it did. And those curved, tapering strokes are exactly the ones you'll reach for when we pipe frosting and draw a clean plate line next week.

2. Color Mixing Exercise (10 minutes)

Pick two colors from your palette and mix them at different pigment-to-water ratios. Start heavy on one, then shift slowly toward the other. Paint little swatches, and label them if you like. Notice where the color turns from warm to cool, light to dark.

By the end you've got a finished chart of your own colors to keep and learn from — and an instinct for how your pigments behave together that shows up in every painting you make from here on. If you'd like a head start on next week, try mixing a warm sponge color, a soft frosting tone, and a berry or two — you'll have your cake palette ready to go.

3. Color Wash Practice (10 minutes)

Choose one wash — flat, graded, or variegated — and paint it three or four times on scrap paper. Compare them. What worked? Where did it go streaky or uneven? Adjust your brush load and try again.

Each attempt teaches you something about timing, water control, and brush movement. Think of every one as a finished little study you can set side by side and learn from. A smooth, even wash is also exactly what you'll lay down for the cake layers next week, so this one does double duty too.

What I Hope You Take From This

I'm not saying you should never finish a full project. A finished painting is wonderful, and I hope you make plenty of them.

In fact, when you're ready to put those drills to work, these beginner-friendly flower projects are quick and fun.

What I am saying is that the small, quiet sessions — the ones it's easy to brush off — are real painting too, and they finish something every time. A page of brush control. A set of color tests. A couple of thumbnail layouts. Each one is paint on paper, and each one is progress. 

You don't need to complete a full project every time you pick up your brush.

You just need to show up, wet your brush, and make something small and real. Do that often enough, and the skill builds steadily the whole time — the same way a good cake starts long before it ever reaches the oven.

So the next time you finish a page of stroke drills and wonder whether it counted, look again at what's right in front of you. You finished something. It's painting.

And next week, we'll put all three of these little practice sessions to work in a simple watercolor cake — your curvy brushstrokes for the frosting, your colors for the layers, your wash for the cake itself. The prep you do now is what will make it turn out. See you back here for Paint the Cake. 🍰