Watercolor Web

If you are going to paint a background, then you need to start working on your background early. Don’t wait until until you finish the foreground to start worrying about background.

The reason you should paint your background first is simple. The natural tendency in watercolor is to make the initial washes in a painting too light because you are comparing your values to the white of the paper. If you establish your background first, you can compare the values in the foreground to the already established value in the background. Reworking a background value later in the painting is generally not as noticeable as reworking the foreground.

In the following example, I worked on the background for days before I dealt with the foreground. Once the background was complete, I painted with figures in the foreground very quickly at the very end of the process.

Background Painted First

Just about any combination of red, yellow, and blue will produce a flesh tone in watercolor. Each situation is different and no formula substitutes for your own observation. I will share what works for me.

For average caucasian skin, I use Winsor & Newton Raw Sienna or Yellow Ochre (they’re quite similar), M. Graham Cadmium Red Light, and a blue, violet, or (rarely) green, The blue depends on the subject, the lighting, and the pigments I am using in the rest of the painting. Cerulean blue is probably the easiest to work with and works best for light-skinned subjects. Sometimes I use Winsor & Newton Cobalt Blue and sometimes I use Holbein Mineral Violet.

When working with fair complexions, I move toward a cooler yellow such as Winsor & Newton Cadmium Yellow Pale. As complexions get darker, I move to darker yellows and earth tones, stepping down from Raw Sienna to a brown ochre to raw umber and finally to burnt umber.

Reds get warmer as complexions get ruddier. For a young, fair-skinned model I might go with a permanent rose. I will choose a warmer red, such as cadmium red light, for skin that is darker or has been exposed to the sun. For really dark skin, I will choose anything from cadmium red light to even a cadmium orange in some circumstances.

The cool color, used mostly for shadows, is the most difficult to categorize because so much depends on the light source. For shadows I use the same yellow and red that I used in the light, and I add a cool color that neutralizes the yellow and red. The most important thing is to not use too much blue in the shadows. You basically want a darker and more neutral version of what you have in the light.

My dog tore up my camera. Sigh. So, recently I have been shopping for a new camera.

When I started painting, I always worked from life. A couple of years ago I realized that working from life, although it is a great way to work, severely restricted the types of poses I could paint. I wanted to paint movement — crowds of people, skateboarders in mid-air, dancers, and revelers. I bought a point and shoot camera. It worked well enough, but it had some drawbacks. Maybe it was a blessing when Lucy ate my camera because the old camera gave me a chance to learn what to look for in a camera for reference photographs.

SLR or Point and Shoot?

Camera snobs will tell you that you need an SLR, but I’m not convinced. An SLR is not going to magically give you a better reference photo. You can get the exposure wrong on an SLR just as much as with a point and shoot. Depth of field doesn’t make much difference because your photo is not a final product; you can always blur parts of your painting. Megapixels don’t matter; anything over about 3 megapixels is fine for a reference photo. Zoom range doesn’t matter either; some compact point and shoots have the equivalent zoom range of a 300mm SLR lens.

Here are the real advantages of an SLR:

• Speed - Even after you depress the shutter halfway to autofocus, a point and shoot camera has a delay of about 1/3 of a second between the time you press the shutter and when the camera takes the picture. With an SLR, the shutter delay is imperceptible. If you are shooting a still life or a landscape, this delay doesn’t matter. If you are photographing a crowd or a person in motion, however, 1/3 of a second is an eternity. It’s long enough for someone’s head or hand to appear between you and your subject, and it’s long enough for a fast-moving subject to completely disappear from the frame.
• Control over Lighting - If you are willing to use an external flash that is mounted off-camera, then an SLR can give you more control over lighting your subject. If you are working indoors, you should avoid using your camera’s built in flash or an external flash mounted on the camera because the direct light eliminates all the shadows and flattens the form. In a figure drawing session, you never want to sit next to the main light; in photography, you never want the main light source to be on your camera. (It’s okay to use on-camera flash in the sun because the sun will be brighter than the flash.)
• Lenses - An SLR also gives you more lens choices, which can be important for certain subjects and styles of painting. One of my favorite watercolorists, John Salminen, uses a telephoto lens to get a spatial compression that is essential to his design. Similarly, a fast, fixed lens will allow you to get pictures in low light situations without a flash. If you want to take reference photos of people in dimly lit restaurants and bars, you need a much faster lens than you can get with a point and shoot camera.

A point and shoot camera gives you one enormous advantage: portability. You can’t take a good picture unless you have your camera with you. You can put a point and shoot camera in your pocket or your purse, and it’s always there when you need it.

What Did I Eventually Buy?

I couldn’t make up my mind, and I bought two cameras: a point and shoot and an SLR. I keep the point and shoot, a Panasonic DMC-TZ5S, with me all the time. I use the SLR, a Nikon D60, when I am on an expedition to take reference photos. I use the SLR when I know that that I am going to be shooting in less than optimum circumstances such as fast moving subjects or low light.

Sometimes I want to create sketches at a small scale before do start a watercolor on a large sheet of paper, and I want the proportion of the sketch to match the proportion for the large sheet. Here’s a simple calculator that will figure out the dimensions you should use in your sketchbook.

For example, suppose you are planning to do a 22″ x 30″ painting, and your sketchbook is 8.5×11. Enter the numbers in the form, click the “Calculate!” button, and you will see that you will need to crop your sketchbook page to 8.07 x 11 to keep the proportion the same as your full sheet.

I’m having trouble getting this to work inside the blog. If you’re interested, take a look at it on my other website.

I very often hear admonitions about the importance of value in painting. What I hear less frequently, except for advice that preliminary value sketches are helpful, is practical advice on how to go about choosing values. Although I don’t have a specific formula for deciding on values, I have accumulated several rules of thumb that are helpful to me.

First, some general rules:

• Values are always relative. You cannot reproduce the actual values that you see, so you have to consider each value in relation to another value on the page.
• Figure out your lightest light, your darkest dark, and your middle values before you begin painting.

A big question for me always is which value to start with. Traditional watercolor advice has always been to start with the light values and work your way to the darks. This strategy, however, produces very anemic paintings for me. I usually prefer to start with a fairly strong value. Here are some specific things that work for me. Of course, sometimes the rules contradict one another.

• Start with the background. I like to start with the sky when I can.
• Start with large areas of value. When I establish a strong middle value with a big, flat brush up front, I have a much better chance of success. When I start with one of my kolinsky rounds, I often fail to establish the big areas of the composition.
• Look for middle values that cut across other areas of value. For example, grass or trees may span a broad area of the painting. The foliage may be lighter than a shadow area and darker than another area in the light. If you establish the middle at the beginning, then you will be better able to judge the other areas of the painting.
• Start with values you can change later Often, my first value statement will be too light. It’s better if start with a simple area you can glaze later. For example, if I am doing an architectural subject, with complicated patterns of light and dark, I don’t want to have to go in later and rework all the complexity. Not only does this take a lot of time, it overworks the painting as well.

• Don’t make the shadows on white objects too dark. The shadow side of a white object is never more than 50% dark. You may have to adjust your other values accordingly.
• Cast shadows come last.

I had noticed for several months ago that the light and shadow on an object can change very suddenly and dramatically. This phenomenon was especially noticeable around 1:30 in the afternoon. I figured that the sun must shift from the east side of the sky to the west side of the sky around 1:30. My solution was simply to plan for a lunch break around 1:30. Everything worked fine until yesterday, when I was working in the morning and experienced the same sudden shift in lighting. I decided it was time to learn more about exactly how the sun tracks across the sky.

early morning
photo

late morning
photo

Here is an example of what I encountered. I took the first photo at the beginning of the painting session, around 9:00 a.m. I took the second photo about two hours later. The switch from the lighting conditions of the first photo to the lighting of the second photo happened very suddenly a little after 10 a.m.

When I got home, I found a utility at the U. S. Naval Observatory that will calculate the altitude and azimuth of the sun at specified intervals for any location on any day. This is a very handy tool for learning how to predict shifts in outdoor lighting. Later in the day, I returned to the cemetery with compass and an azimuth table in hand and realized that the tables confirmed what I had observed while painting.

Working outdoors in the summer, there are 4 ways an object can be lighted. Assuming that a building is on a north/south axis*, the lighting changes when the azimuth of sun reaches 90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees. In the winter and early spring, the sun crosses the 90 and 270 degree thresholds before sunrise or after sunset. Here are a few illustrations of these phases of light:

Sunrise to 90 degrees

The north and east sides of a building are in sunlight. In early July in Atlanta, this stage lasts from sunrise to 10:20 a.m.

90 degrees to 180 degrees

The east and south sides of a building are in sunlight. This stage lasts from 10:20 a.m. to 1:40 p.m.

180 degrees to 270 degrees

The south and west sides are in sunlight. This stage lasts from 1:40 p.m. to 5:10 p.m.

270 degrees until sunset

The west and north sides are in sunlight. This stage lasts from 5:10 p.m. until sunset.

* - Note: If the building is not on a north/south axis, it is still easy to calculate when the light will change. Simply figure out how many degrees the building is oriented from north, and then add or subtract that interval to the light shift intervals. For example, the north side of my house is actually about 26 degrees west of north. To figure out when there will be a major light shift, I subtract 26 from 90, 180, and 270 respectively, and then read the azimuth table. (return to text)

Some days the paintings work, and some days they don’t. Yesterday’s was a real stinker, and I’m trying to figure out why. (Maybe I’ll post a picture of it later.) The scene was a group of backlit trees and a tombstone painted late in the afternoon. The foreground was in complete shadow.

What Went Wrong, and what to do about it next time

The drawing was sloppy, but I’ll forgive myself for that. I was actually more interested in a reasonably quick value study than in fine draftsmanship yesterday. On to the other issues:

Value

I generally have more success when I establish a strong middle or dark value up front, rather than working from light to dark. The challenge comes in deciding which value to establish first. In this painting, I started with the light yellow/green around the plants, which was probably a mistake. Then I made the greens in the left side of the paintings too dark. I didn’t establish my darkest values until the end of the painting. So, what what lessons did I learn?

• Establish a large area of a middle or dark value early on in the process, preferably in an area that I can go back and glaze later. Clear skies are ideal because they are easy to correct later.
• I should have established the darks, the tombstone and the tree trunks, sooner. If I had already established the value of the tree trunks, then I would have known immediately that the background leaves were too dark.

Composition

Composition problems usually turn out to be value problems in disguise. The paintings tend to work better when I play back and forth between what I observe and what I think the abstract design should be. In yesterday’s painting, I was much too concerned with trying to capture exactly what I saw.

Color

Although I usually don’t squawk too much about color, color was a problem yesterday. (Or was it actually a value problem?) The tombstone and foreground were muddy, even though it was a single wash. Perhaps I should try to darken the tombstone? I’m not sure whether the failure was a value problem or a color problem.

I was very happy with the latest lion that I painted last Thursday (June 2006).

The ninety-plus degree heat and a code red smog alert made the working conditions less than pleasant. The actual sky was light and hazy; I darkened it considerably after I got home.

My palette for this paint was raw sienna, burnt sienna, cobalt blue, and ultramarine blue.

This lion was a rework of another lion I did a couple of days earlier. In the first attempt, I had a lot of trouble placing the image on the page. He kept winding up smaller than I had originally intended.

I did another watercolor outside this morning. Although I wasn’t entirely happy with the results, I did manage to take pictures after each wash. Here’s what I did:

Step 1: Working out a Battle Plan

The subject was a white statue in shadow. The challenge was to get the statue dark enough to read as a shadow and light enough to contrast with the background.

I did this watercolor early in the morning about a week ago at Oakland Cemetery. Finding a shady spot in which to work was a challenge and forced me to work from a radical viewpoint, which made for some dramatic foreshortening. Overall, I was pleased with the result.

Materials and Technique

I used Arches 140# Rough paper from a 12 x 16 block.

My palette was:

• Raw sienna
• Burnt sienna
• Cobalt blue
• Ultramarine violet
• Thalo turquoise
• New Gamboge