The Beginner's Guide to Watercolor Landscapes: Paint Stunning Scenes with Simple Techniques

Rebecca Burdette is a watercolor artist and instructor whose work explores the quiet drama of everyday landscapes — the way morning light falls across a field, the geometry of bare winter branches against a gray sky, the subtle color shifts in a stretch of coastline as the tide recedes. She has been painting in watercolor for over fifteen years and teaching for more than a decade.

Rebecca earned her BFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she initially focused on oil painting before discovering that watercolor's immediacy and unpredictability suited her creative temperament far better. She pursued further training through workshops with some of the most respected names in contemporary watercolor, including Joseph Zbukvic, Alvaro Castagnet, and Thomas Schaller, absorbing their approaches to atmosphere, light, and composition while developing her own distinctive voice.

Her work has been featured in exhibitions across the United States, including the American Watercolor Society's Annual International Exhibition, the National Watercolor Society's Annual Exhibition, and numerous regional gallery shows. She is a signature member of both the American Watercolor Society and the National Watercolor Society, distinctions that recognize sustained excellence in the medium.

Rebecca's teaching philosophy centers on demystifying watercolor without stripping away its magic. She believes that technical skill and creative expression are not opposing forces but partners — that understanding how water, pigment, and paper interact gives an artist the freedom to take risks and make intentional choices rather than hoping for happy accidents. Her workshops, held at art centers and conferences across the country, emphasize hands-on practice, clear demonstrations, and the kind of honest, constructive feedback that helps students see their own work with fresh eyes.

In addition to teaching, Rebecca writes a regular newsletter called *The Watercolor Lens*, which reaches over eight thousand subscribers with technique tips, painting prompts, and reflections on the creative process. She also maintains an active YouTube channel where she shares full-length painting demonstrations, material reviews, and studio vlogs that give viewers an unvarnished look at the realities of a working artist's life — the failed paintings alongside the successful ones, the experiments that don't pan out, the slow accumulation of skill that happens when you show up at the page day after day.

Rebecca lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and two cats. She paints daily in a small studio that overlooks a backyard garden, and she maintains that the best thing a watercolorist can do for their work is to spend as much time looking at the world as they do looking at their paper. When she is not painting, she can be found hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, photographing cloud formations, or reading mystery novels in the company of a cup of tea.

She is currently at work on her next book, which she describes as a deeper exploration of value and composition in watercolor landscape painting, with an emphasis on painting from life rather than from photographs.