Watercolor Web

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.

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.

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

Value does all the work; color takes all the credit.

I saw this quote on a bulletin board a while back, and it has become one of my favorites. There are so many times people have looked at my work and said: “Oh, the colors are so great.” The truth is that I pay very little attention to color, but I pay a lot of attention to value. If the value structure is strong, you can do pretty much whatever you want with color.

Handprint has an striking example of why value is so important at http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color11.html.

He displays two modifications of a watercolor by Winslow Homer. On the first copy, he leaves the values intact but makes the colors the same — essentially a black and white picture. On the other copy, he retains the original colors and makes all the values the same. The second copy — with everything set to the same value — is virtually unrecognizable.

Here’s another example of a Sargent watercolor. There’s no way the shadow under that umbrella was bright viridian. No reflected light from the grass is going to bounce that much green into a shadow, and yet it’s a very convincing image.

Now, look at it in black and white. The color is wild, but the values are right on the mark.

Hopefully, these examples will convince you of the importance of strong values. So, now the question becomes how to think in terms of value. Ultimately, you will have to resolve this question for yourself. Books and other folks can share pointers and advice, but no two people will do it exactly the same way. It’s an ongoing journey. However, here are a few things that have helped me:

• Try to arrange your painting into no more than 12 shapes of 3 or 4 values. The fewer shapes and values the better. I usually try to think of 3 values: light, middle, and dark.

  We recently had a Andrew Wyeth exhibit here, and I was astounded at how simple the compositions were. Even with all the details and the drybrush technique, he only used a handful of shapes.

  As a rule, a scene will have a lot more than 12 shapes. And sometimes you won’t be able to get it down to 12 shapes. All the same, it’s always good to think about how you are going to join and minimize your shapes.

• The eye is going to be attracted to the area of greatest contrast, so I try to put my lightest light and my darkest dark near the center of interest.
• I try to establish a very definite value — sometimes a middle value and sometimes a dark value — at the start of my painting. (And I usully try to establish this area in some place that I can adjust later if necessary. In otherwords, I rarely start off with a complex shadow shape that will look overworked if I have to go in for a second pass at the value.) Establishing a strong value up front breaks the white of the page and gives me something against which to judge all my subsequent values. You tend to see values relative to other values, and if the only value you have to compare to is white, then it’s easy to misjudge a value. You’ll think something is a nice, middle value, and then you realize later in the painting that it is actually very light.

* Learn to draw the head before you worry about portraits. Get a skull — a plastic one from a medical supply house — and study the bones. Find a good anatomy reference. Also, get a copy of one Bridgman books.

* When you’re drawing the head, worry about getting the shape of the head right. Concentrate on big shapes — the cheek bone, the front and side planes of the forehead, and the eye socket. Make sure you make the cranial cavity big enough, and, if you have a 3/4 or profile view, make sure you don’t cut off the back of the head. If you get all that right, the features will usually take care of themselves.
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I just did an experiment.

First, I took two pieces of construction paper, orange and green, and held them between my light source and a white sheet of paper. (I had to put a piece of cardboard behind the construction paper to prevent the light from shining through the paper.) The shadow cast by the paper was neutral, with no evidence of the green or the orange reflecting onto the white paper.

Second, I moved the construction paper so that it faced the light and then put the cardboard between my light and the white paper. The shadow cast by the cardboard contained lots of green and orange light cast from the colored paper.

Here is a crude diagram of what I did. The top diagram, with the colored paper in the middle, cast a neutral shadow. The bottom diagram, with the colored paper reflecting back, had a colorful shadow.