Tints and shades
You can also add white or black paint to another color. When you add white, the new color becomes a tint of the original color. That's how red becomes pink, for example. When you add black, you make a shade of the original color. That's how you get maroon from red. Make a chart of tints and shades. You can use Figure 5-2 as a guide. 1. Using watercolor paper, grab your pencil and draw a 4-x-1-inch rectangle for each color exploration. 2. Choose a color and place it in the middle of the...
Folding out an easel
What kind of easel you take depends on how far you're hiking to paint. I personally have a 7-foot rule Paint no more than 7 feet from the car. If you stay close, you can haul heavy things more easily. A nice luxury is a portable easel. Most of the time they are wooden, although you can get metal models too. A portable easel folds compactly into a small suitcase size. Most have a drawer to hold supplies and a shelf with a support to hold your paper, which adjusts to any angle or lays flat. They...
Project Building a Barn
Okay, after all this drawing, how about a little painting This is, after all, a book about painting. This project allows you to practice your drawing and shading skills as well as work with perspective. Then you get to give your paintbrush a workout as well. The farm scene in this project is a collection of cubes buildings , pyramids roofs , and cylinders silos . The scene uses two-point perspective. Should you need to draw your own two-point perspective, measure the roof line and the ground...
Tools to Help You Get a Better Drawing
Up to now, I've been discussing tips and techniques for drawing images freehand. The public seems to prize drawing freehand. Did you do that freehand Wow Somehow using tools and aids is regarded as cheating. I'm here to tell you that it's okay to cheat sometimes. In fact, in this section, I'm going to tell you how to cheat. And I'm not going to use the word cheat anymore after all, it's just using tools. As you start drawing, you develop more skill and a better eye. But because we have cool...
One two three lift
Want to remove or erase paint You can At least you can make an area lighter. You can lift remove paint to correct excess paint or create a highlight. How much paint you can lift depends on the paper and pigment. Some papers lift more easily than others. Some paper brands have a softer finish and lift very easily. Some brands absorb the pigment and are more difficult to lift however, these papers can be layered with paint without disturbing what lies underneath. Your paper dealer can advise you...
Stretching your paper
Water on paper makes the paper buckle. The more water you apply to paper, the more wrinkles and buckles you make. To get rid of wrinkles and buckles, you can stretch the paper flat either before or after you paint on it. The bigger the sheet of paper, the more important it is to stretch it. A bigger sheet of paper has more room to expand and contract therefore, it gets more wrinkles when it gets wet. The wrinkles get in the way of watercolor washes being able to flow, so stretching minimizes...
Going Back to the Playground to Keep Your Balance
Remember the teeter-totter I remember playing on one with a kid who was much larger than I was. The big kid thought it was hilarious to sit on one end and hold the equipment down while I dangled helplessly above. Things were definitely out of balance. I got help from another friend, and teaming up, we two little kids could bring the teeter-totter to a level position. We were back in balance. Balance in your painting is similar, but it's a visual balance rather than a physical one. And, just...
Paint It Again Sam Repeating Yourself
Repetition is another principle of design . . . another principle of design . . . another principle of design. Repeated oval shapes with slight variations create a harmonious picture. Repeated oval shapes with slight variations create a harmonious picture. You can repeat any element in paintings repeat colors in all areas of the painting repeat values repeat shapes repeat lines or textures. Repetition is visually pleasing, though you need to make use of some tricks to keep repetition from...
Spraying your art out
You mostly use spray bottles with water, but you can also spray paint for interesting and useful effects. The different types of spray bottles and their effects include Pump sprayer Pump sprayers give an irregular spray pattern, which is exactly what watercolorists want at times. These bottles have the pump at the top, and you use your index finger to pull down against a spring to pump the liquid out of the bottle to spray. Remember washing windows with a similar bottle When you use them, push...
Figuring Out Compositional Formats
Choosing the size and shape of your painting is your first big decision. The shape of your paper helps determine the format of your composition. A typical watercolor format is with the longest length of the paper horizontal your desktop printer calls it landscape view and so do other artists. But don't forget other formats. You can choose the other view your printer knows, vertical or portrait, where the paper is longest vertically. You can break out of these standard views and paint in a...
Repairing an unwanted bloom
The easiest way to fix a bloom is to avoid making one. And the best way to avoid making one is to ignore those who speak ill of watching paint dry and baby-sit your painting as it dries. Until it's dry, your painting can change and do some weird things. If you can see a bloom forming where you don't want one, nip it in the bud by using your brush to pull the wetness and pigment around the perimeter of the area so it's evenly wet. Never leave a puddle unless you plan on a bloom. Blot puddles and...
Put in the details like shingles bricks and curtains
Because details are so tempting, you may want to paint them first, but waiting until later can save you much heartache. Believe me, you don't want to add a shadow next to some detail you already painted and have the detail disappear underneath the shadow wash. Greeley, Colorado, the town I live in, was founded by Nathan Meeker. Horace Greeley sent the young newspaper man to Go west, young man and start a town more than 100 years ago. Meeker's home is now a museum that just happens to be next...
Activating Your Paint
Before you paint, you need to get the paints in your palette ready for painting, or as I say, you need to activate your paints. Chapter 2 shows you how to put your pigments into your palette using the color wheel as a guide. When paint sits, it dries out. You can still use it you just need to get it juiced up and ready to go. Add water by dropping it in with your brush or spraying the paint with your spray bottle. You can mix the dry pigment and water in the well, or you can make a puddle in...
Drawing Geometric Shapes and Adding Dimension with Shadows
One of the best methods to use when you're new to drawing is to see things as simple geometric shapes. Almost everything can be broken down, or abstracted, into circles, squares, and triangles. When these flat shapes get three-dimensional form, they become spheres and cylinders, cubes, and pyramids. When I start talking about drawing, everyone immediately says, I can't draw a straight line. Who cares Straight is boring. There aren't any straight lines in any of my paintings. Another stereotype...
Surveying city scenes
City scenes are exciting and brimming with life. The tall buildings are a vertical contrast to horizontal roads. Lights, signs, and people add to the flavor. Streets and sidewalks are a nice visual lead-in to the picture plane. The way you choreograph the lines and shapes determines how long a viewer's eye stays at your picture or how quickly that eye turns to the next picture. A line can lead you into a picture, but it can also lead you out. Vertical lines, such as the tall buildings in Figure...
Paint the seashell using a round brush with a pointed tip
A. Paint the seashell area with a transparent pink as shown in Figure 11-7a. By adding water to the paint, you make it more transparent or see-through. B. While the color is wet, drop in some other colors like yellow and orange wherever you see the need. In Figure 11-7a, I kept the darker colors on the bottom and the yellow on the top to make it look like light is hitting the shell. C. Allow the paint to dry or use a hair dryer. Adding color details to the seashell. Adding color details to the...
Maintaining Perspective
In the preceding section you make one view of each of four geometric shapes. One perspective. How do you make more The rules of perspective help you make shapes look correct in space and in relation to each other. Perspective uses horizon lines and vanishing points. These items are created by you, the artist. The horizon is where the sky meets the earth. The vanishing point is located on the horizon line and is the point where all horizontal lines converge. If you extend the horizontal lines of...
Dont forget the paint er coloring pigment
Paint is made up of a couple of elements. Pigment is either chemical or natural coloring that has been ground to a fine powder. The powder is added to a binder that makes it sticky and allows it to be used as paint. The binder for oil paint is oil. The binder for milk paint is milk. Now, what's the binder for watercolor That's right, it's gum arabic Okay, it was a trick question. Gum arabic is a water-soluble, sticky, clear goo that when added to pigment makes watercolor. Powdered pigment can't...
Studying Values
Relax, I'm not delving into your morals. When talk turns to values in the artistic crowd, the conversation is about light and dark in your painting. Chapter 5 has even more on values. One of the most important things to plan, especially in watercolor, is where to put lights and darks in your painting. Because transparent watercolor uses the white of the paper for the light areas, you need to plan to save the whites and light areas by planning where to put the darks. It's easy to use color and...
Dropping WetinWet
One way to let watercolor work for you is to paint wet-in-wet. The paint is wet and the paper is damp. The paint travels a little on damp paper. You can even paint on damp paint. I sometimes think that what scares people from using watercolor is the perceived lack of control the paint moves But that movement is precisely the fun of watercolor. Lose control and enjoy it. This wet-in-wet technique can be a garden of flowers, an abstract, or a cool background. What will yours be 1. Use a quarter...
Paint the next lightest area the deciduous aspen trees
Plan where you want to have the yellow aspens and paint them next. See Figure 10-21 for guidance. With a round brush, dot lemon yellow paint at the top of the aspen foliage. As you continue the round shape of the foliage, paint cadmium yellow. Drop in a bit of cadmium red and yellow ochre toward the bottom.
Showing still Water with reflections
Quiet, calm water is a mirror reflecting what is sitting on or near the water. It would be rare to find a still body of water that wasn't reflecting something around it. Not to mention boring. The more movement in the water, the more the reflections wiggle in the water. Each wave and ripple acts as an individual Paint calm water using mostly horizontal strokes. Diagonal and vertical directions just don't work unless the water is spilling or splashing. A calm harbor reflects wiggling lines as in...
Focusing on Waterfowl and Other Feathered Friends
Part of the charm of the beach is the birds. And these feathered friends can serve a variety of functions in a seascape, from being the center of interest to providing a visual element to help balance a painting, or bringing some life and movement to a stretch of sea or sky. Figure 11-13 shows some great choices for inclusion in your seascapes, but keep in mind that I can only squeeze so many examples into this brief space. You can include many other species of birds in your paintings. Get a...
Paint in the coniferous trees to outline the deciduous aspens and define the
Check Figure 10-23 to see my final placement. Mix a dark green by adding alizarin crimson to hookers green. With the tip of the round brush, paint the pine trees around the aspens. The pine trees define the aspen shapes. Dot in some dark green in the aspens to show the pine trees behind them. Paint around the aspen trunks with the dark green. The light aspen trunks show well against the dark. When painting the pine trees, try to vary the trees' heights and widths, and the spaces between the...
Tackling Three Basic Painting Techniques
Master these three watercolor painting techniques, and you'll know all you need to paint anything you want. These techniques really are all you have to work with. I have no idea why it took me 40 years to figure that out. Truly, the rest of this book is just refinement and details. Here are the basics 1 Flat wash and hard edges A wash is pigment in water. A flat wash is an even color with no variation in color value light or darkness . A hard edge is a crisp, abrupt change, like a line. 1...
Making ocean Waves
A wave is a complete circle of water. Only half of it appears above the horizon the other half is underwater. The top or crest is what you see as the highest point. The center is the eye and appears as the lightest area where the sun shines through. The white stuff you see when the wave crashes on the shore is foam. Foam can be a line or a pattern of white that allows the water's darker color to show through in a calm wave. A wave and its parts are shown in Figure 11-3. Waves are generally...
Painting on Rice Paper
Painting on crinkled rice paper helps you produce watercolors with an artsy look and sometimes an Asian feel. Rice paper is a thin, absorbent, see-through paper usually made in Japan. Some papers have designs embossed or imbedded in them. There are many beautiful types available at most art supply stores, and you can use other types of thin paper as well. Applying paint to rice paper forces the artist to let go of rigid edges and allow a little randomness to take over. Nature scenes work nicely...
Shifting sand
White sand can be like painting snow. The white of the paper is the white sand. The shadows describe the mounds of sand. Details are painted last, if at all. To make a shadow, paint the mound edge with a hard edge brush stroke and soften the other side away from the mound with water so it fades into the distance. The way you manipulate the shadow's shape outlines hills and valleys in the sand. Depending on the time of day and the influence of the sun, ultramarine blue or purple is a good shadow...
Breaking In and Maintaining Your Brushes
If you take care of your brushes, they should last your lifetime. I still have my first serious brush I bought in college some 20, ahem, 30 years ago. Usually the only reason I buy a new brush is because I have scrubbed and worn the tip out on an old one so it doesn't hold tiny detail any more. I try not to scrub with my good brush to prolong its life. When you use your good pointed brush constantly to soften hard, dry paint, you wear out the tip on the brush. Some watercolorists only use fresh...