Tips and Techniques for Painting in Watercolor
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.
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.
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:
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.
I used Arches 140# Rough paper from a 12 x 16 block.
My palette was:
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.
* 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.
Keep your equipment and materials simple. Mobility is important, and you don’t want to have to spend 20 minutes getting everything set up. My plein air kit consists of:
