Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium (12 page)

TOM HOFFMANN,
SEDIMENTARY,
2010
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES COLD PRESS PAPER
15 × 22 INCHES (38 × 56 CM)

Each of the major shapes in this painting has only two or three layers. In the topmost shape, layer 1 was a pale violet rectangle. The purple wash of the mountain was the second layer. That’s all there is. Does the snowy part of the mountain look lighter to you? This is partly because it is surrounded by a darker value, and partly because calling it “snow” creates the expectation of whiteness.

To see the first layer as it underlies the later, darker, and more specific ones, it is necessary to look past the darks and mid-values. This is a kind of selective vision that takes practice. Before you begin painting, ask yourself:
What will the individual
layers look like?
To rehearse, look at the examples on the following pages and try to see through the darks and mid-values to the first layer that lies beneath.

For instance, with
Sedimentary
, above, the entire middle ground started out as a light orange wash, illustrated opposite. As a second layer, a pattern of slightly darker horizontal orange stripes was applied, then the darker blue shadows were laid on top of those. The butte in the foreground similarly involved three layers that progressed from
light to dark.

To avoid getting painted into a corner, watercolor painters need to develop the skill of seeing a couple of layers ahead of themselves. I often feel a sense of despair after one or two layers have been applied. As with the image opposite, at this stage the painting often looks completely hopeless. I want to go out and get a real job. Do not give up on a picture until you have put in the darkest darks! It may, in fact, turn out to be a failure, but you cannot be sure if those powerful darks are not there yet. By now, I have seen enough paintings raised from the dead to be a believer.

Look at James Michael’s inviting scene,
Winter Dunes,
on
this page
. If you could peel back each layer of paint, as though they were overlays in a biology textbook, you could re-create the progress of the painting in reverse. To see this progression before the painting was started, the artist had to be able to mentally suspend all of the successively darker layers while he painted the lightest one.

When the major shapes were blocked in with just their lightest overall washes, the canyon scene looked something like this—flat shapes awaiting texture and shadows. At this stage it takes faith to believe that the layers to come will provide the illusion of light and substance and space.

Deliberately ignoring the layers that come later is easier if you have a good sense of what they look like on their own. To see right through the darks, for example, it helps to be able to recognize them as a pattern apart from the lighter forms. Try picturing the darkest darks from the photo on
this page
as a separate image. It helps to squint.

Once you’ve visualized the darkest darks in the color photo, check the image in your mind’s eye against the image on
this page
. Without the light- and mid-value forms, the darkest layer would look like this. Are there any surprises? If the layers of the original
photograph were printed on transparencies, this layer, the darkest darks, could literally be peeled back to reveal the middle values and lights beneath. Instead, when we look at the photo or the actual scene, we do the peeling mentally.

Identify the darkest darks.
Staring at the top of this photograph of Callejón, Oaxaca, the wires would all be part of the darkest layer, along with the vertical poles, the eaves and windows of the buildings on the left, the cast shadows of those buildings, the underside of the purple bougainvillea … What else?

JAMES MICHAEL,
WINTER DUNES,
2008
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
22 × 48 INCHES (56 × 122 CM)

Working backward, imagine the scene without the darkest darks (the conifer), then with the medium darks removed (beach grass in shadow), then the dark mid-values (footprints), and finally the lighter mid-values (sunlit grass and cast shadows on snow), until nothing is left but white paper.

Visualize the darkest darks in isolation.
Exaggerating the contrast of the photograph of Callejón, Oaxaca, isolates the darkest darks. When subtle values are rounded up or down only black and white remain.

Apply the light and mid-values.
I have deliberately painted “outside the lines” to see if it’s true that the darks have enough narrative clarity to make sense of this mess. If it works, it means that when I’m laying down the first two
layers, I need not be distracted by detail, and all of my attention can be devoted to simply making gorgeous, juicy paint.

Apply the darks, carefully.
This is a good example of the benefit of asking:
What needs to be true in the finished painting?
Being a little careful with the darks allowed me to be carefree with everything else.

TOM HOFFMANN,
Callejón, Oaxaca,
2011
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES COLD PRESS PAPER
11 × 11 INCHES (28 × 28 CM)

How much care does each layer require?
With a high-contrast image like
Callejón, Oaxaca,
when we see the darks separated from the other values, it is clear that they do most of the work of establishing the illusion of reality. The cast shadows reveal the strong light, while the obvious perspective of the buildings defines a clear feeling of space. Recognizing this early on can be truly liberating. If we can depend on the darks to pull the whole picture together, the lights and mid-values can be applied very casually.

Alas, we cannot always depend on the darkest darks to pull our paintings together. Some images are chosen specifically for the subtlety of the light- and mid-value forms, and the darks cannot be counted on to make the picture cohere. Others seem so complicated we cannot easily discern the role the darks will play. In these cases, it may be necessary to begin taking care earlier in the progression of layers.

Recognizing in advance the point at which shapes need to be defined can be tricky. Get in the habit of assessing the effectiveness of the illusions you seek as the painting develops, layer by layer. Eventually, you will know before the painting begins what role the lights, mid-values, and darks play in creating a feeling of space or light or substance, and this will inform the degree of care you take at each stage. Looking back at the images at left will make this point obvious.

TOM HOFFMANN,
Homestead,
2009
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES COLD PRESS PAPER
12 × 19 INCHES (30 × 48 CM)

In this scene subtle texture and color play a bigger role than in
Callejón, Oaxaca.
The middle values and the lights tell more of the story than the darkest darks. Consequently, more care must be taken in the first layers. Some of the edges between shapes need to be established right away, rather than waiting till the darks go down.