Watercolor paintings, tutorials, and videos
Watercolor daffodils today and aren’t they perfect if you need cheering up! The wonderful Paul Foxton is continuing his livestream painting sessions during the corona virus lockdown and I managed to actually catch him live and be organized enough to get the reference photo printed out in readiness.
I think I really quite like this one. It has an ethereal quality to it that I like and considering that daffodils are really hard to paint it was pretty successful.
Another set of Zbukvic and Chien Chung Wei copies today. Only 3 more as time was limited. Some successes (bottom left I was happy with) but struggled a lot.
This is the current state of play with the rose paintings. I chose a more subtle range of values for this one and went straight in with paint with no prior drawing. This turned out to be more successful than I first thought. The previous two weeks of drawing roses definitely helped me keep track of the rose construction and where the petals are. It’s been a pretty successful series I think – lots learned at every stage.
Here’s the full set :
This step by step Eilean Donan Castle watercolor painting is in muted tones. It’s always a favorite and there isn’t a view of this that isn’t worth painting. I especially loved the warm ochres of the castle contrasting with the blues of the sky and water. This watercolor castle tutorial was great fun to do. If you try it I’d love to see what you do!
We only want an indication of the castle and its surroundings on the paper. So no detail in the walls and very few windows or twiddly bits. There are also no pencil marks in the sky or the water. We’ll put the clouds and the reflections in as we paint.
Before even starting to paint the castle watercolor I did some color swatches on a piece of scrap paper. This allows me to do some planning and thinking ahead of time. When you’re in the middle of a watercolor painting there’s very little time to waste. The paint is drying and you have to get those marks right before they dry. So anything we can work out before we get the brushes wet the better.
I’ve also included Munsell notation for the colors. This isn’t really necessary (although I find it very useful) as long as you try and match that color as close as you can from the reference.
My process is I match the important areas to the Munsell system and practice hitting the right hue, value, and chroma. I can always tell if the color palette will result in a harmonious picture from the result. Definitely looked good for this one.
I you want to know more about how the Munsell color system can help click through to this post. It also includes information about the online ChromaMagic tool which helps you see color more accurately.
I started with the sky and worked it wet in wet. This keeps the edges of the clouds soft. While the paper is still wet you can drop in slightly darker color to indicate the shadows on the undersides of the clouds.
The background mountains went in next. These are suprisingly dark but I kept the colors muted towards grey. They form a good backdrop to the castle itself and the dark color provides a nice contrast.
We’re going to paint the castle itself in layers. I’ve painted a few watercolor castles and I find this gives a great effect. So we don’t want any detail in this first layer. This will be the base layer of the walls. You can add some texture into this by using a water spray bottle or splattering some water with your brush.
The water and reflections needs to be soft so I made the paper wet with a clean brush full of water. I then brushed in the reflections of the sky and the castle walls and dragged them down slightly to get the reflection effect. As the paper is wet when we do this the colors meld together. This isn’t the final step in the reflections yet but I wanted to get something on the paper to be able to judge the rest of it more easily.
This is where the magic happens! It’s the best bit! The painting has been looking a little flat up to this point. We’ve put all the first layers in but we have no darks in there! These are what will give a sense of three dimensions to the castle and add some interest to the painting.
The shadows are put in simply with a darker wash of ultramarine and burnt sienna. The darks go in on the side of the castle away from the light (the right) and also under the arches of the bridge. I also start to put in some shadows for the rocks at the base of the building.
I run online zoom courses regularly for both beginners and more advanced students. Please check out my workshop page.
Things are looking a lot better now. Phew! Now the main shadows are in and working I can put in the details for the windows, chimneys and doors. Note that if the previous step hasn’t worked and you don’t have something that’s reading as three-dimensional no amount of detail will fix it. I know – I’ve been there many times.
And go careful with the details. The windows may look dark but they only need to be a shade or two darker than the walls. They’ll really stand out and catch the eye if you put them in close to black.
I was fairly happy at this point but I knew that the water and reflections were too light. I washed over the water again with a glaze of blue, light and dark brown. This gives the water a definite value change compared to the sky and makes the painting’s composition more harmonious. As a final touch I took a very dry synthetic brush and dragged horizontally through the reflection area. This has to be done while the paint is still wet and gives an effect of ripples on the water.
This was a really enjoyable watercolor painting to paint. There were a few hairy moments along the way (aren’t there always) but it all came together in the end. I still really like the color scheme. Only a few colors used but they work together well.
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I didn’t video this painting but I have another version that can be viewed below, on my video page or on my youtube channel.
Yellow watercolor roses were a bit of a departure for me. However, I’ve been avidly watching Paul Foxton’s oil painting videos on Facebook. He has a fantastic way of telling you what he’s doing that is incredibly instructive. I highly recommend looking him up and his website also has a wealth of information on it. He also runs online courses which I haven’t investigated yet but I may well do when I’ve saved up some pennies.
But anyway. I was watching him paint a still life of 3 yellow roses and thought that I’d like to have a go at that just for a bit of an experiment. I took a quick screenshot of his setup and just went in with paint without drawing. This is not my usual way of working and frankly I thought it would be a disaster and I’d end up throwing it away. However, I took it seriously and tried to carefully measure the colors and values and match them as best I could. Amazingly I got a lot closer to what I was intending than I ever thought. Now, things aren’t perfect by any means but carefully measuring the colors and values I got a lot closer to the effect I was hoping for than I usually do with flowers.
The main things that helped me was very careful consideration of the hue and value (with a bit of attention to chroma) for each area. I tried to hit it first time (failed for the most part) and in subsequent layers to keep any extra pigment within that value range. This kept me from making the flowers too muddy. Close attention to the hue kept the deep parts of the roses close to the original.
There’s lots of stuff I’d change of course. The vase is actually a different shape and the edges of the flowers are too crisp. I misread the background color and made it too red and the leaves are a little too broad. I still didn’t get enough chroma in the depths of the roses and there isn’t a lot of form to them. Oh I could go on and on…..
And the main thing I would do differently is that I did this from a screenshot. I should really be sitting in front of actual flowers. I don’t have a great lighting setup for that right now but I’ll be rectifying that in the next couple of weeks.
Oh and the final thing – painting flowers is exhausting!! This took me a couple of hours I would say but I was basically useless afterwards. Very intense. Constant concentration and judgement required and one false stroke and all is lost. Never let anyone tell you flower painting is for wusses.
Oh and the final final thing – I actually did two. Here’s the first.
I’ve been saving this scene for a bit since our painting trip to the Naval Yard in Boston. I had a disastrous outing with a previous scene but couldn’t resist the boats for any longer. I’m pretty happy – the effect of strong sunlight is there and the composition is pleasing. A good days work.
