Watercolor Painting for Dummies (45 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
I haven’t met a beginner yet who wasn’t scared of backgrounds. (I think they’re the most fun, though.) Perhaps it’s the ambiguity or perhaps it’s the control issue that is inhibiting. Whatever the problem, it really is no problem. Most of the time, I like to just make a soft, out-of-focus blur of colors. Watercolor makes this pretty easy.
Use this sequence when you’re ready to add a background to any still-life items that you have already painted.
1.
Choose the colors that you want in the background and activate your paints.
Don’t know what colors to choose? Try three
analogous colors
(neighbors on the color wheel).
You may develop a style of choosing colors. You may always choose colors that are repeated in objects within the still life, or you may choose colors that are quite different. Look at other paintings to determine which color patterns you prefer.
Mix large enough puddles on your palette so you won’t have to stop and mix more color during your wash.
2.
Wet the background area thoroughly with clear water. Make it evenly damp.
If the paper starts to dry, rewet it. When you apply the color, you won’t form hard edges as long as the paper stays damp.
3.
Drop in colors and sweep them with your brush next to the subject and allow the color to softly dissipate into the wet area.
Go close to the subject, but don’t take so long that you allow the background area to dry. Mix colors on the paper as little as possible. Let the water move the paint around and do the mixing work. If you use your brush to stir the paint around too much, you’ll make mud. Instead, pick up the paper and tilt it until the colors blend nicely. Flip ahead to Figure 9-11 to see an example of this type of background.
Do you always have to paint the background after you finish the main image in the still life? Of course not. There really are no rules. At some point you just need to make a plan (even if it’s just in your head). Sometimes the background is easier to paint first because a light background can be covered later by a darker subject. Sometimes you want to surround the subject after you have painted it on clean white paper. You can even work the background and foreground up together if you have a plan. Or you may not want a background at all, and therefore, white is alright.
Lines or hard edges in backgrounds are caused by uneven wetness. The color travels to the edges of wet, gets stopped by a dry area, and creates a hard edge. Don’t allow a spot to dry if you want the color to keep traveling. Of course, if you go back in and introduce a lot of water, you have uneven wetness again, only this time with too much water rather than a dry spot. More water in a damp area causes a blossom. Practice keeping your paper evenly wet. Get the dampness consistent before adding color. Blot too much water with a paper towel, or soak it up with a dry brush. Better yet, spread it around. The paper will absorb the water quickly. If you have too much wetness, wait. Watercolor will teach you patience.
Deciding what items to put in your still life is where you show your personality. Choose items you like. Tell a story. The story doesn’t need to be elaborate. If you’re making lemonade, your still life would feature a pitcher filled with ice, amber liquid, and floating slices of lemon. On the countertop would be some whole fresh lemons, perhaps one cut open, a knife, and a little drip of tart lemon juice puddled in an interesting shape. Did your mouth water? That’s the effect you want to create.
I like to put things together that relate to each other. In art school, we had to paint still lifes of anything left in the art department. I still have paintings of skulls with tennis shoes and weeds (mainly because no one would buy them). If selling is your motive, you need to hit a responsive chord with art patrons. But if you just want practice, you can paint anything. A crushed paper bag is a popular art school subject because it allows budding artists to practice light and shadow, and creases and folds by manipulating a light, medium, and dark value.
Think of all the stories you can tell with a still life. Add a photograph of a person to mementos to recall a personal history. Explain a hobby, play a game, grow a garden, show holiday treasures, celebrate a sport, cook a meal, explore a nostalgic past, make a science lab of the future, see color in a scattered pile of crayons or toys. There’s no end of stories to be told through still-life arrangements.
Artists and wannabe artists should also cultivate areas other than art as interests. Then you’ll have endless subjects to paint. I often get the comment, “You do so many subjects!” True. I like a lot of stuff. Some artists specialize in one topic and that works very well too. My favorite topics are western, water, animals, cars, rural, fish, spiritual, mountains, ocean, birds, flowers, people, gardening, travel . . . hmm . . . perhaps focus has some merit.
As always, you may just enjoy the simple beauty of the objects. Light and shadow inspires me to paint. What can you place in a still life? What can’t you?!
Perhaps you don’t have a cupboard filled with priceless collectibles or a greenhouse with oodles of plants to serve as still-life subjects. Do what I do with some of my artist buddies. Ask the local antique dealer or greenhouse owner if you can sit in his store for a day and paint. The owner usually loves the idea — you entertain the customers. If painting in front of the public is a bit inhibiting, ask if you can take photographs. Tell the owner what you’re up to, compliment his inventory, and promise that if your painting turns out, you’ll return and show him. Use your art to make friends.
Why are fruits and vegetables so popular in a still life? Besides being beautiful and a snack for later on, fruit with shiny skin like apples, oranges, and pears reflect color, as does that fruity vegetable, the tomato, and squashes and gourds and all sorts of things. When they’re placed beside one another, a little color from one will bounce off and reflect onto the other. For example, when a yellow pepper and a red pepper sit beside one another in a still-life setup, a little red reflects on the yellow pepper and a little yellow reflects onto the red pepper. It’s color heaven!
Going to the grocery store now becomes a search for art supplies. All produce is fair game: onions, berries, carrots, eggplants, and pineapples. Look for items that reflect light. Put them against ones that aren’t shiny. Make groupings of like colors. Make groupings of vibrating colors. You think that everything has been done? Not until you do it too. You’ll make your own unique still life.
Even, whole, neat circles are boring. So break them up by overlapping other shapes.
Figure 9-11 shows a still life using fruit. Notice how all the circles are broken up by having something else overlap in front of them. Overlapping creates the illusion of depth of space and solves the boring-circle dilemma. The viewer completes the circle in her brain. I like to get the viewer involved by not showing everything. Even the foreground fabric gets in the way and helps break up the shape of the front grapefruit. It’s a good idea to make round shapes more interesting and less predictable.
Figure 9-11:
Fruit provides color and reflection in still lifes.
The bottle creates a striking vertical counterbalance to the horizontal fruits. It’s a good idea to have verticals and horizontals to fill space. This makes a triangular composition and gives the viewer’s eye a path to follow. (For more on composition and eye path check out Chapter 7.)
The bottle in Figure 9-11 provides a challenge in that it is transparent glass. How do you give viewers the impression that they’re seeing something through glass?
Well, you start by observing glass. People will think you’re crazy now that you’re an artist because you stop to observe everything. By really taking the time to look, you’ll also learn to see. Before you started painting, you may never have noticed the subtleties of a highlight or the bounce-back of fruit colors. I contend that you’ll live longer by enjoying these visual treats.
Glass is complex, but knowing a couple of easy-to-follow rules will make it believable in your painting:
Glass distorts.
Things tend to distort when seen through glass. If something starts on one side of the glass and goes behind it, at the point of touching the glass, the object bends a little. The distortion is greater if the glass container is filled with water. This is useful information if you have a glass vase with water holding a flower in your still life. Straight lines wiggle a little behind water and glass.
Glass makes things grayer.
When seen behind glass, items are a little grayer and less defined. The color of the glass also influences the color of whatever is behind it.
In painting the bottle in Figure 9-11, I painted the entire bottle green first and lifted highlights out of the damp paint using a dry brush. I lifted the circular highlights after the bottle was dry. After the green of the bottle was dry, I painted the items that appear behind it. I added a little more water to the paint to do the sections of fruit behind the glass to make them a little lighter than the pieces not obscured. To achieve the bright white edges on the bottle, I used a razor blade to scrape off the paint. You can also save this white edge using masking fluid.
You can use many methods to achieve the same look, and one technique you can use when painting glass is
glazing.
You paint everything behind the glass, like a stem or leaves or a tabletop. Use clean hard edges. Let it dry. Then
glaze
(a little pigment in a lot of water layered over other layers) a color of your choice over the glass area. (Chapter 3 tells you about this technique in depth.) Depending on the paper, this softens edges and looks like glass in front of your items. Ironically, when framing a picture, the glass used is called
glazing.
