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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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* 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.