Meet Olga Koelsch

Watercolor artist, book author and educator based in Norway.

Hello,
I am Olga Koelsch!

I'm a watercolor artist, book author, and educator based in Bergen, representing Norway in NAS (Nordic Watercolor Society).

My journey with watercolor began in 2016 with a simple set of paints. Within a year, I made significant progress in botanical illustration and participated in prestigious botanical exhibitions across the UK, USA, and Japan.

By 2018, I began experimenting with modern watercolor techniques, particularly focusing on transparency and expressiveness, which led to my first custom orders. Today, I'm a full-time artist, with my work featured and licensed globally, including collaborations with Hobby Lobby, Home Decor, Next, and Karen Millen.

I am proud to be a Resident Artist at Arches and an Ambassador for Princeton Brush, Maimeri, Canson, and Daler-Rowney.

As an educator, I've had the privilege of teaching students from around the world and sharing my passion for watercolor. In addition to my YouTube channel and my book, “How to Paint Watercolor Transparent Flowers,” I’ve developed a series of in-depth watercolor courses that have received incredible feedback from my students. Your progress inspires me to develop easy-to-follow yet comprehensive classes that empower you to paint with confidence, offering a solid foundation of skills to support your creativity.

What I Love to Do:

What My Students Say:

¨I want to thank you so much. You explain things in such detail, demonstrating patiently all the while. I am not a beginner but I am wishing I had someone like you to help me understand where I so often went wrong and why. Learning through making mistakes is valid but without understanding the fundamentals, e.g. the properties of paint, that method of learning will always bring frustration. Your work is stunning and I am very much enjoying this course.¨

¨This is the best lesson on color mixing, I learned so much. The color swatching brought it all together for me. I love your little book of colors for various flowers, what a handy resource. I think it will also be helpful when I want to recreate some of the colors. I am such a visual learner, this was excellent.¨

¨I found it invaluable and feeling more confident with the colour wheel, warm and cold and saturated and desaturated colours. Thank you¨

“The explanation about how to mix the color to achieve results was clear and straightforward. I learned a lot about tone and enjoyed swathing colors ”

“This is not something that was ever addressed. Picking up paint and palette mixing and diluting. Leading to the heavy use of pigment. I am glad to have gotten the bundle even though I thought I knew what I was doing... HMMMM. Thanks so much. ”

Paint with me (live)!

Want to stay up to date on when the next free class will be? I share everything on my Instagram account, @olga.koelsch. In those one-hour classes, we paint together, and you can ask me any question about the technique or about a career as a painter.

Let's Stay Connected!

Do you have any questions or want to chat a little bit more? You can send me an email at [email protected] or leave me a message below and I will get back to you ASAP!