Graded wash: dark to light in one move
Okay. You've got the flat wash down, or at least you've got a version of it that doesn't look like a checkerboard. Good. Now we're taking that same idea and making it do something more interesting: a wash that starts dark and fades to light, in one pass, no going back in to "fix" it halfway through.
This is the wash you'll use for skies, mostly. Or the shadowed side of a canyon wall, or water that's deep and murky up close and pale near the shore. Anytime something goes from intense to faded in real life, this is your move.
What's actually different here
A flat wash, you mix one puddle of color and water and drag it across the page, same strength top to bottom. A graded wash, you're changing the ratio as you go. More pigment at the top, more water toward the bottom, and the transition has to happen smooth, not in stripes.
The trick isn't a special brush technique. It's what's happening in your water dish and your paint puddle while your brush is moving. You're diluting as you go, not switching colors.
Steps
1. Tilt your board. Same as the flat wash, prop it up at a slight angle, maybe 20 degrees. Gravity is doing some of the blending for you. Don't skip this.
2. Mix a strong puddle first. Get your color mixed up nice and saturated, more pigment than you think you need. This is your darkest value. You'll be cutting it with water as you move down the page, so start strong or you'll have nothing left to fade from.
3. First stroke, full strength. Load your flat brush, lay one horizontal stroke across the top of your wet area. Don't fuss it.
4. Add water to the puddle, not the paper. Dip your brush in clean water, swirl it into your paint puddle to weaken it slightly, then do your next stroke, slightly overlapping the bottom edge of the first one. Repeat. Each stroke gets a touch more water mixed in before it hits the page.
5. Keep going until you're basically painting with water that has a memory of color in it. By the last stroke or two, your brush should be mostly clean water picking up just enough pigment off the page to keep the transition soft.
6. Let it alone. Same rule as always. Once it's laid down, walk away. Don't chase it with your brush, don't "just fix that one spot." Fixing is how you get a hard line where you didn't want one.
Here in American Fork the dry air means this whole thing sets up fast, faster than any video you'll find made by someone painting in a basement in Ohio. You've got maybe a third of the time they show you. So mix your puddle before you start, not while you're halfway through the wash panicking that it's drying on you. Prep first, move confident, don't dawdle between strokes.
The mud thing
If your gradient comes out looking a little muddy or uneven in spots, that's fine. Genuinely. I think people panic about mud way more than they need to. A little muddiness in a sky wash reads as weather, honestly, clouds or haze or that grayish quality the light gets up the canyon on an overcast day. Learn what causes it, sure, so you can control it on purpose later. But don't scrub at a wash trying to make it perfectly clean. You'll usually make it worse and you'll definitely make it duller.
A caution, actually
Don't tip your water dish onto your paper by accident while you're doing this. Sounds obvious, I say it because I've done it, twice, reaching for more water with my eyes on the page instead of my hand. A full dish of gray paint-water dumped across a graded wash is not a happy accident, it's just a flood.
The one I forgot about for four months
I did a graded wash sky, blue at the top fading to almost white at the horizon, pretty early on, back when I was still bad at basically everything else in the painting. I liked it enough to keep it, stuck it flat in a drawer so it wouldn't warp more than it already had, and then just forgot it existed. Found it again four months later doing a drawer cleanout. Still liked it. Same painting, same me, and I hadn't gone "oh, that's rough" the way I do with almost everything else I make. That basically never happens. Most of my old stuff I look at and wince. That one just held up.
I don't know exactly what made it work. Probably luck, honestly, and a puddle I mixed strong enough at the start. But it's part of why I keep telling people the gradual fade is worth practicing even though it feels fussier than a flat wash. When it lands, it lands.
Before next time
Do three or four of these on your cheap paper, different colors, don't worry about subject matter yet, just the fade. See if you can get one where you can't point to exactly where dark turned into light.