Watercolor paintings, tutorials, and videos
I treated myself to some hot press paper and this is its first outing. We spent the New Year at Old Orchard Beach a couple of years ago and I snapped the pier which turned out to be a pretty nice composition.
For a first outing I’m pretty happy. No blending on the paper with hot press and with the fans and the heat the paint dries pretty much immediately. Some nice effects though.
This Portsmouth, New Hampshire painting was a bit of a turning point for me when I did it. I’d been banging my head against a brick wall for a few months and not getting anywhere. Many of my watercolor paintings weren’t working out and I just couldn’t work out why! I’d have all these great plans, lots of things went right but the end result was just disappointing. I’d pore over the results and try to work out what went wrong but I just couldn’t work it out. I’d try multiple versions with different approaches and still no joy.
Until this one!
Now you may think that this isn’t much to write home about. And, frankly, looking at this a couple of years later I agree with you. But at the time I was over the moon. I think I’ve moved on a bit from here – this Marlborough painting for instance or this Arlington Str church painting.
So what was it that made the difference? That’s the million dollar question. I’d been reading Edgar Payne’s book on composition and he mentions breaking down each scene into a few big shapes. I thought ‘why not give it a try’ so I took this scene and tried my best. I decided to give each shape a ‘mother’ value so the arrangement would be visually appealing and just vary the value slightly within each shape. There was also a fair amount of detail in this which I treated as a separate shape of its own.
And you could knock me down with a feather it worked! A lot of this was that trying to keep everything harmonious within it’s own shape made me simplify things to a much greater degree than I’d been used to. And this combination of retaining the big shapes with some variation within them for interest absolutely did the trick.
I’ve been using this approach ever since. And it’s worked well. I don’t rigidly stick to it but it’s a great starting point especially for very complicated street scenes.
I run online zoom courses regularly for both beginners and more advanced students. Please check out my workshop page.
Two tries today. Both of the Boston skyline. The intention was to keep the colors muted and the values subtle. Not too much detail but enough to suggest buildings. The first one above was definitely the most successful but even this one suffered from some bad brushwork in the water. Nice in parts though.
Here’s the second:
Small paintings made from a larger painting are pretty unusual. The more common way of doing things is a smaller study as prep.
I don’t usually do copies of paintings but I was in a bit of a bind this morning. The deadline for the small works exhibition was today and I had absolutely nothing of the right size to enter. As time was short I settled on painting one of my favorite subjects (the First Baptist Church in Marlborough) in recent months in a 5×7 format as opposed to a 11×14. Turns out it takes as much time painting a small painting as it does a big one – with extra fiddlyness.
Now this is a bit unusual for painting. Usually we do smaller studies and then make them bigger which has it’s own problems of course. But going in this direction from large to small was new to me. And to be honest I wasn’t sure if it was going to work.
However, as it turned out I shouldn’t have worried. Time wise it took just as long as a large one but it was definitely more pleasurable to paint. Partly this was because, well, I’d done it before. I’d worked out all the problems, the value changes, color scheme etc. But partly it was that the small scale just doesn’t allow you to noodle around with things. You can’t indulge in painting killing detail as there just isn’t room! And all this simplification really helps the painting hang together.
I run online zoom courses regularly for both beginners and more advanced students. Please check out my workshop page.
