There's a reason watercolor feels at home in the Pacific Northwest. The medium works with water; the region is defined by it. From the marine air that softens light across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the rivers carving through the Olympic Mountains, water shapes everything here. Watercolor painting, with its washes, bleeds, and transparency, captures the character of this landscape in ways that denser, more opaque media sometimes struggle to match.
Historical Roots
Watercolor has been used to document the Pacific Northwest since the earliest European expeditions. Naturalists and survey artists in the 18th and 19th centuries carried watercolor kits because the medium was portable, fast-drying, and suited to field conditions. Their paintings of coastal landscapes, native plants, and indigenous communities became some of the first visual records of the region available to European audiences.
As Washington State developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, watercolor moved beyond documentation into artistic expression. Regional painters began responding to the landscape not as scientific subject but as aesthetic experience. The misty valleys, the gray-green forests, the dramatic contrast between mountain snow and low-lying fog: these became the characteristic subjects of Pacific Northwest watercolor.
The mid-20th century saw a flourishing of watercolor societies across Washington and Oregon. Groups like the Northwest Watercolor Society (founded in 1939) created exhibition opportunities, teaching networks, and a shared vocabulary for artists working in the medium. The society model gave watercolorists institutional support at a time when the broader art world often treated watercolor as a lesser medium compared to oil painting.
The Pacific Northwest Palette
Ask a watercolorist who paints in the Pacific Northwest to describe their palette and you'll hear certain colors mentioned repeatedly. Sap green. Burnt sienna. Payne's gray. Raw umber. These earth tones and muted greens reflect the dominant colors of the regional landscape: evergreen forests, rain-darkened bark, overcast skies, and the gray-blue waters of the Puget Sound and the strait.
But the palette isn't uniformly somber. Seasonal bursts of color punctuate the gray: the shocking pink of rhododendrons in May, the purple of lavender fields in July, the orange-red of vine maples in October, the silver-white of snow on the Olympics through winter and spring. Good Pacific Northwest watercolorists know how to use these moments of intense color against the prevailing neutral ground for maximum effect.
The region's atmospheric conditions also push watercolorists toward techniques that embrace ambiguity. Wet-on-wet washes create the soft edges and gradual transitions that mirror the way fog, mist, and marine air actually look. Hard edges and precise detail have their place, but the painters who best capture the Pacific Northwest tend to be comfortable with a degree of dissolution, letting the paint and water find their own resolution on the paper.
The Sequim Difference
Within the broader Pacific Northwest watercolor tradition, Sequim occupies a distinctive niche. The rain shadow microclimate means that painters here work in conditions quite different from their colleagues in Seattle, Olympia, or the San Juan Islands. The light is brighter and warmer. The air is drier. Colors appear more saturated. Skies are blue more often than gray.
This affects technique in practical ways. Paper dries faster in Sequim's low humidity, which gives the painter less working time for wet-on-wet washes but more control over layered glazing. The reliable sunlight creates stronger shadows, adding a sculptural dimension to landscape compositions that overcast-country painters often miss. The result is watercolor work that reads as distinctly Pacific Northwest in subject but often has a clarity and warmth uncommon in the region's painting.
Many of the watercolorists who participate in our Plein Air Festival remark on this difference. They're accustomed to fighting the dampness that makes outdoor watercolor painting challenging in most of western Washington. In Sequim, the medium cooperates.
Learning Watercolor Here
Sequim Arts offers watercolor workshops throughout the year, from introductory sessions for absolute beginners to intensive master classes with accomplished regional painters. Workshop topics have included landscape composition, wet-on-wet technique, botanical illustration, color mixing for Pacific Northwest subjects, and plein air methods.
The availability of nearby painting subjects makes Sequim an ideal place to study watercolor. Within a short drive of any workshop location, students can practice at Dungeness Spit, along the Dungeness River, in lavender fields, at the marina, or in the Olympic foothills. The diversity of subject matter available within such a compact area is one of the reasons watercolor instruction has become a core part of our programming.
Contemporary Practice
Pacific Northwest watercolor has evolved considerably from its landscape-painting roots. Contemporary practitioners in the region use the medium for abstraction, figure work, urban sketching, narrative illustration, and conceptual projects. Some work on non-traditional surfaces (wood panel, fabric, yupo synthetic paper). Others combine watercolor with ink, gouache, collage, or digital techniques.
In Sequim's galleries, you'll find the full range: traditional landscapes hanging alongside experimental work that pushes the medium in new directions. That coexistence is healthy. It reminds viewers that watercolor is not a fixed tradition but a living practice, constantly renewed by the people who use it and the places that inspire them.
The Pacific Northwest has shaped watercolor painting for more than a century, and the medium continues to evolve here. For anyone curious about exploring it, whether as viewer or practitioner, the Olympic Peninsula is one of the finest places to begin.