A while back I had the bright idea of photographing the steps of a simple watercolor painting. I've just rediscovered the series and thought I'd share it with you. I also hope to share more of my paintings in this space over the next year, much like I shared some family heirlooms with you in 2011. So in case you ever wondered about watercolor, read on.
This is not a particularly stellar work of art. I usually paint from photographs, but I just made this up in my head back in November 2009 (though it's loosely based on a field I see on my drive back from Grand Rapids that is often full of beautiful black cows).
Choose your colors and paint samples to see how they look dry. Here all the washes are about the same (aka, the water to paint ratio is the same in all of them—to make colors lighter you add water, darker you add paint).
Here are the washes on my palette. I don't often make all my washes at once (because if you don't use them at once and some water evaporates, it will end up a darker wash, of course) but since I knew I'd be doing this painting very fast, I made everything up at the beginning.
First I wet down the whole paper (which is held to my board with masking tape) and lay in the color for the sky. Darker up top, lighter at the bottom. Often it is easier to do a sky with your board upside down so that the extra paint flows toward what will eventually be the top of the sky.
The field is next. Note that it's not all one flat color. A field has shadows and highlights depending on the plants, the lighting, and if there's a hollow, etc.
Then throw in the base of the treeline using wet-on-wet technique (dropping different colors/washes of paint onto wet paper). This gives it a soft effect. The tendency when first starting out to paint trees and foliage is to try to do individual plants, which never really works out on a landscape. You will find that you have better results if you paint as though you are looking through a foggy window or looking at something without your glasses. Look for the overall effect. Don't miss the forest for the trees, as it were.
Next I added a darker reddish color to represent staghorn sumac, which proliferates at the edge of woodlands and along highways. I started wet-on-wet, let dry, then added more paint on the dried paper, giving it some texture.
Add some more defined trees, including conifers which add a nice contrasting color (green and red are opposites on the color wheel, so green and orange set each other off nicely). Note that they don't all appear as whole trees going all the way to the ground. Some are left as just tips giving the impression of deciduous trees in front of them. Trees that are closer to the viewer are darker. Colors become more muted as they get further away.
To finish off this painting I added dark dried grasses and barbed wire fencing in the foreground and little black cows in varying positions in the middle ground, which is always my weak spot in painting landscapes. I find the background and foreground to be fairly easy and usually enjoyable. But that middle ground always challenges me.
Frankly, even after two years, I'm still not so sure about those cows.
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