Watercolor Painting for Dummies (24 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
Watercolor also works quite well with
pastel,
which is a chalk-like, opaque drawing medium. You can use a watercolor wash as background and apply pastel over the top to draw on or to cover over the watercolor. When I first started to watercolor, the results were sometimes less than fabulous. Adding a layer of pastel over the watercolor frequently saved a painting. A white pastel can return white to an area where it was lost.
Pastels come in different shapes. The stick allows you to draw a wide area using the side. The pencils have a nice point and are good for detail and tight spots. They’re also especially good for signing your name when you finish a painting. You can use pastels in any scene. I used it in Figure 4-15 in the engine’s steam.
If you’re using pastels, do your watercolor painting first. Watercolor doesn’t go over pastels without making a slight mess. I should also warn you that pastels will rub off — on your hands, on your clothes, on anything it touches.
Figure 4-15:
A puff of steam gets some help from pastel chalk.
Acrylic
paint is a polymer-based paint that is water-soluble until dry. When dry it’s permanent and can’t be easily lifted. It can be painted
opaquely,
which means that you can’t see through it.
Some artists mix acrylic with watercolor. For example, say you want something to not be removable. Maybe you want a background that won’t lift when you add the next layer. Acrylic is permanent after it’s dry and would be a good choice. You can also use acrylic to paint over the top of — dare I say? — a mistake. In Figure 4-16, I painted the poppies with acrylic paint over a watercolor wash background. The white is from paint instead of saved paper.
Figure 4-16:
Using watercolor and acrylic paint in the same painting.
In this part . . .
T
hese chapters contain the nuts and bolts that hold your art together. The first chapter in this part explores the color part of watercolor. The other chapters help you decide how to arrange your painting subjects according to accepted principles of design. They also offer tips on how to turn what you want to paint into a drawing that you can use as a guide for your painting.
After you have a handle on how all of these tools work together, you can rearrange the components to suit your own style and interpretation.
In This Chapter
The care and feeding of a color wheel
Getting along splendidly with complementary colors
Breaking the concept of color into its various parts
E
nglish uses nouns and verbs to convey information. Nouns are people, places, and things. Verbs are the action that happens to the nouns. In art, elements of design are the “nouns” or things (not people and places) that you use in your art. The art elements you can work with include color, shape, size, line, direction, and texture. (Yes, art has “verbs” too — the principles of design. You can read about them in Chapter 6.)
In this chapter, I introduce you to the foundational element of color, and I show you how to create lots of color charts that you can reference in the future. (
Note:
I spend this entire chapter discussing color because there’s so much to say — we are talking about water
colors,
after all. But don’t fret: I introduce the other design elements, too, in Chapter 1.)
The exercises in this chapter help you understand your paint. Make the color charts and write the color names beside the paint samples so you can refer to them over and over. These charts are for
you.
Put as much information on them as
you
need. Make the charts the size
you
like. If you need them big, use a full sheet of paper. If you want the pocket-size version, make the charts smaller so you can keep them with your paints for handy reference.
You know your colors. You learned them in kindergarten. But as an adult, you may have forgotten some of the rules about color, like which colors mix to make other colors or which colors complement each other well. The rules aren’t complicated, but you need to know them so you can organize and take control of color in your paintings. One tool that can help is the color wheel.
When light passes through a glass prism or raindrop, the light is split into colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. You can remember their order with the acronym
ROYGBV,
which you can remember as a man’s name, Roy G. Biv, with the addition of one small
i. (
The
i
can also stand for
indigo,
a dark blue color.)
Artists take this rainbow and curve it into a circle that becomes the color wheel. The
color wheel
is a guide to organizing your palette of pigments. It can also help you choose colors that make better painting designs. Best of all, the color wheel reminds you of recipes for other colors.
Before you can start mixing colors, you have to know how colors are created. After you have the basic understanding, you can mix any color you want.
You can buy hundreds of tubes of different watercolor paints, each color with a different name. But if you use a color wheel, you can mix hundreds of colors from just the basic primary colors! What a money savings.
In this section, you figure out primary, secondary, and tertiary colors and then cap off your knowledge by creating your own color wheel.
All color begins with
primary colors.
From primary colors, you can mix secondary colors, and then tertiary colors, and thousands of varieties thereafter. With these color recipes and theories, you can cook up any colors you desire. Primary colors are:
Red
Yellow
Blue
Primary colors are so named because you use them to make all the other colors, but no other colors make them. Nothing you can mix produces primary colors. You can, however, find a vast variety of each of these three primary colors in paint pigments. Check out the positioning of red, blue, and yellow on the color wheel in Figure 5-1. The primary colors are equal distances apart. Figure 5-1 is a guide to follow to begin your own color wheel using the colors in your palette.
When two primary colors are mixed in equal amounts, they create
secondary colors.
Secondary colors are:
Orange (mix of red and yellow)
Green (mix of yellow and blue)
Purple (mix of blue and red)
Secondary colors are located on the color wheel between the two primary colors that were mixed to create it.
Figure 5-1:
A template for a basic color wheel.
When a secondary color is mixed with a primary color, they produce a
tertiary color.
Tertiary colors are:
Red-orange
Yellow-orange
Yellow-green
Blue-green
Blue-violet
Red-violet
Tertiary colors are located on the color wheel between the secondary and primary colors that were mixed to create it.
In life, someone must be first, and someone must be last. So it is with color names. The color is the same whether you call it yellow-green or green-yellow.
