Watercolor Painting for Dummies (35 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
As the director and producer of your painting, you need to choose a star of the show, known as the center of interest. The
center of interest
is the focal point of the painting, the main object or area that you want viewers to see. Everything else should be supporting players in your stage show. If you give equal importance or attention to more than one item, you confuse the viewer, distract her attention, and make her eye leave the painting in search of something she understands more easily. You may even bore her, and you want to entertain her. So you need to decide what you want your audience to see in your painting. What struck you when you were moved to make this painting? What inspired you to paint this scene, this group of objects, this creature? The answer to those questions is what you want in your center of interest.
How do you make your item or area the center of interest? You tell your audience that it is the focal point of the painting by making it more detailed, brighter, bigger, sharper in contrast, or the lightest light against the darkest dark area.
In contrast to its name, you do
not
want to put the center of interest in the center of your painting. If you draw an X that reaches the four corners of your paper, the intersection of the lines is the exact center of the page. Nothing of importance should go there.
Instead, take a lesson from the Greeks and Romans, who invented the
rule of thirds.
Actually, they called it something a lot more complex — you know those Greeks and Romans. They made some very complicated formulas you can follow to find the perfect point of placement, but they liked math more than I do. An easy way to get to the same spot is to imagine a big tic-tac-toe board on your paper, which divides your paper into thirds both horizontally and vertically. The intersections of the lines are the choice spots to set your center of interest. Choose one.
The center of interest doesn’t have to be just one item; you can have an area of interest, rather than one center of interest. If you are painting a grouping of flowers, you can make one area more defined and interesting, thus making it an area of interest.
When it comes to day-to-day living, avoid these things: walking down dark alleys late at night, consuming too much alcohol, eating too much fried food, getting too much sun. In painting, you also want to avoid certain things, such as placing important elements at the center or corners, to make your compositions better.
Just as the center of interest doesn’t belong in the center of the page, don’t place other elements there either. A horizon cuts the painting in two if placed in the center. You do better to shift it up or down for a more interesting painting.
Avoid dividing the paper vertically too. Don’t have a tree, a flower, a sailboat mast, or anything else split the paper into two equal sides.
Equality has no place in art. Make variety your new motto. Vary the sizes of the spaces, the colors, the directions — everything should have variety. (Chapter 6 goes into more detail about variety.)
A line leading to any corner of the paper is an invitation to the viewer to follow that line right out of the painting and on to the next one. If you have a road or a river leading into the picture, make sure the continuation of the line, even if it isn’t visible or painted in the picture, leads the viewer’s eye above or below the corner and not directly to it.
Tangents
are items or lines that touch or just kiss. Kissing is good for people but bad for paintings. Tangent areas make it difficult for the viewer to figure out what’s going on in the painting. A much better solution is to overlap shapes and lines so the viewer knows what’s in front and what’s behind. This also creates a deeper sense of space. Creating a sense of deep three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface like flat paper is difficult enough, so use all the tricks possible to make it believable.
“That’s the way it is in my photograph” is no excuse for poor composition. I once painted a landscape with a tree that had half its foliage missing. I think I put it in the center of the page too. It looked silly. But that was the way it was. So what? This is art. Are you recording a scene like a camera? Or are you composing a fabulous work of fine art? Your choice.
A beginner’s
faux pas
(goof) is to timidly put a little vase of flowers in the center of the paper and leave a whole lot of background with nothing going on. Fill your space. Make the subject go completely out of the picture plane. Crop the photo you’re working from for interest.
Make every shape in your painting interesting, and that includes the background shapes. Perfect geometric circles, squares, and equilateral triangles aren’t interesting. They are predictable and straight. Make shapes with different lengths and widths and unexpected edges. When painting trees, remember that the area between the trees also needs to be designed as a shape. No two trees should be the same height or width, and so it is with the area between the trees.
Put away the polish and nail file; you aren’t getting a manicure. A
thumbnail
is a mini-size sketch you draw to work out the kinks before you spend all that time, effort, and money on the full-size painting. These sketches serve as little road maps so you know where you’re going to end up in your painting. After all, without a road map you may get lost.
Few things improve your painting more than planning your painting by using a thumbnail. As Ben Franklin said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
Artists call these little sketch plans thumbnails, but usually the sketches are a bit larger than an actual thumbnail. I make them about 11/2 x 3 inches, but there are no rules. In fact, the only person who sees these sketches is you, so you call the shots.
Figures 7-7a and 7-7b show thumbnails for the fence post painting in Figure 7-4 and for the iris project coming up next.
Figure 7-7:
A couple of thumbnails.
When you’re ready to start a painting, think through the composition visually by following these steps to create a thumbnail sketch:
1.
Draw a small shape that represents your painting.
It doesn’t have to be to scale; you just want to duplicate the general shape.
2.
Sketch your idea with a pencil or paint in watercolor.
Usually you don’t want to wait for watercolor to dry for these quick sketches. I usually just draw a rough idea in pencil unless I need to decide color choices.
3.
Sketch another version of your idea.
Always make several thumbnails to work out an idea. You then can choose the best one. It may be your first one. It may be your last one. Unless you make several sketches, you may not know if the one you’ve done is the best one.
4.
Choose the sketch you want to paint, enlarge it, and transfer it to your watercolor paper.
Chapter 8 has instructions on how to enlarge and transfer your thumbnails.
You can keep a sketchbook with all your ideas, journaling, and organization, or you can just doodle a thumbnail on scratch paper and toss it in a box for later. (And, no, you can’t toss it in the round file. How will you measure your progress?) Choose either method of saving your sketches to fit your needs.
Sketchbooks are great to collect ideas and recall them at a later time. Sometimes you feel creative; that’s the time to jot down all the different ways to make a painting. Another time, the ideas may not be flowing as fast, and you can get out the sketchbook full of thumbnails from more fruitful days.
Take your sketchbook everywhere. Keep one in the car, and if you’re waiting on something, you can always sketch. If you sketch with watercolor pencils, you can solve color issues too. Put dates on the pages, and you have a record of your ideas and when you had them.
Make a cool tool that helps you focus in on your subject and doesn’t cost a cent: Get an old overexposed 35mm slide, take out the lousy film, and leave just the slide frame with an open hole. Look through the frame to help you see your subject. Use it like a viewfinder in a camera. Close one eye and look through the frame. As you move the frame closer to your eye, the view is wider. As you move the frame farther away, you crop the view.
