Watercolor Painting for Dummies (47 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
You’ve come to the right place if you want some shortcuts to make better still lifes. Trust me, I’ve made all the mistakes (well, maybe not all — I bet I can still make a few more). But I’m willing to share the easy solutions so you don’t have to make all the mistakes too.
Many of the things you put in still-life paintings are
symmetrical
(the same on both sides). Vases, fruit, cups, bowls, and so on usually have a center axis that makes a mirror image on both sides. Somehow it’s easy to draw one side but impossible to draw the other side to match. I have two quick ways to cheat to solve the problem:
Symmetry is boring anyway, so break up shapes that repeat exactly on both sides
. Figure 9-11 is an example of overlapping fruits to break up perfect circles. Putting an object in front of one side of something also solves the problem of making a mirror image. The grapefruit at the bottom of the bottle is doing this task for the symmetrical bottle.
Make the object perfectly symmetrical by drawing just one side and tracing the other.
Draw only one side and trace that side onto tracing paper. Flip over the tracing paper, and voilà! a perfect mirror image. Put graphite paper underneath the tracing paper and retrace the drawing to transfer it onto the watercolor paper.
Opera
is the name of a bright pink color that I used in the rose painting activity. It comes from duplicating the color of the interior silk of the formal capes worn by men going to the opera in the bygone era when gentlemen actually wore capes. The opera watercolor paint was thought to fade at one time, but you can be reassured that it’s lightfast now.
A circle seen in perspective creates an oval or
ellipse.
The tops of teacups, openings in bowls, the waterline in a vase — all are usually elliptical. The ellipse changes shape depending on the observer’s point of view. Imagine looking straight down at a round bowl. The opening is a circle when you look at it from above. As you move the bowl up to eye level, the circle becomes flatter until it’s no longer an ellipse, but a flat line at eye level. Elevate the bowl higher yet and the flat line bows upward.
Figure 9-22 shows spools of thread, scissors, buttons, thimbles, and a basket — sewing items that make a very colorful statement. Deeper than that, they’re an exercise in ellipses. The eye level of the viewer changes as the threads pile up; therefore, the ellipses change as well.
Figure 9-22: |  |
Find some round objects of your own and arrange them in a pleasing still life. Notice what happens as you move your head up or down. How do the round shapes change?
To draw the shapes correctly, you need to keep your eyes in the same place so you avoid distorting the ellipses. If you feel confident, try drawing the still life. More confident yet? Paint it!
It’s just an occupational ego trip that makes me put pitchers in still lifes. With a name like Pitcher, what do you expect? I also love Fiesta dishes, so I took a picture of a plum-colored pitcher with some wonderful fruit to use as my model. I set up the still life and arranged the apricot, pear, and cherries with the fabric and pitcher. And, in case you don’t know what I mean by
cutwork,
the white fabric in Figure 9-23 is an example. The large holes add interest and let the surface show through.
I wanted to enlarge the view to make the items go completely off the page on at least three sides of the paper, so that’s what my final painting shows. You can experiment with your own perspectives and modifications. Go for it!
Figure 9-23:
Still-life reference photograph with pitcher, cutwork, and fruit.
1.
Choose an 8-x-8-inch piece of watercolor paper, and transfer the drawing in Figure 9-24 to it.
Depending on how large you want your painting to be, you may need to enlarge this image before transferring it.
2.
Activate your paints.
You’ll need lilac, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, alizarin crimson, yellow ochre, lemon yellow, a light green, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, dioxazine purple, Payne’s gray, a green, and a brown.
For this painting, you’ll mix some of the above paints to create new colors. I tell you in the steps below when you need to whip up a new hue. If you don’t plan to paint this still life in one sitting, you may want to hold off activating the paints at the end of the list because those are the ones that you need in the final steps.
Figure 9-24:
Still-life outline.
3.
Paint the shadows with a pointed round brush, using Figure 9-25a as a guide.
For shadow color, I mixed a blue-gray-purple from lilac, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, and lots of water.
I also watered down a lemon yellow for a pale yellow and made a small puddle of very transparent alizarin crimson. Then I dropped the yellow and alizarin into the shadows while the paint was still wet.
Observe hard and soft edges. To soften an edge, run a clean, damp brush along the shadow color. If it dries with a hard edge, you still can soften the edge with a stiff bristle brush and clear water. The best paintings use a variety of edges. One painting may feature hard, soft, and lost edges.
Lost edges
are really soft and dissolve into an adjacent item like the background or something nearby.
4.
While the shadows dry, paint the background, surface, and holes (refer to Figure 9-25b).
Paint yellow ochre (diluted with water) in the background and drop in some burnt sienna around the edges of the paper. Paint the holes in the cutwork and the opening in the pitcher handle, as shown in Figure 9-25b.
Figure 9-25:
Paint the shadows first, and then paint the background while the shadows dry.
5.
After Steps 3 and 4 dry, give the fruit and pitcher a base coat that will peek through any shadows and details that you paint as a layer over the top (see Figure 9-26).
A. Start with lemon yellow and paint the pear.
Lift the highlights with a clean, damp brush. Drop in a light green toward the bottom to make the sphere take shape.
B. Paint the apricot with cadmium yellow.
While the paint is still wet, paint a backward letter “C” with cadmium orange to define the round shape. Lift out the highlights by nudging the paint with your damp brush and lifting off the color to reveal a lighter area. Rinse the color out of the brush and repeat until you have the level of lightness you prefer. (Head to Chapter 3 for more about lifting.)
C. Paint the pitcher and cherry shadows when the adjacent items are dry.
Mix a dark purple using dioxazine purple, burnt sienna, and Payne’s gray, and use this color for the pitcher.
The fabric is reflected in the center of the pitcher, so I left a white highlight there, as well as on the lip of the pitcher. You can lift the highlights or paint around them.
Paint the cherry shadows using the same dark purple color.
Because red runs when you paint next to it with anything wet, I painted the shadows first and layered the red over the top later.
Figure 9-26:
Paint the pitcher, pear, and apricot with a first layer.
6.
Do all the detail work after everything has dried completely (see Figure 9-27).
A. Darken the pitcher with another layer of the same dark purple paint. I did put in some alizarin crimson in the reflected light. See the red-purple in the back curve?
B. Strengthen the pear with another layer using green and purple. Use the same purple as you painted the pitcher, only dilute it until it’s transparent enough for the shadow.
C. Add a burnt sienna shadow to the holes in the cutwork and the edge of the fabric.
D. Paint the cherries with cadmium red, adding an alizarin shadow while the paint is still wet.
E. Soften the highlights with clear water and blotting.
F. Finish the apricot with another layer of cadmium orange and cadmium yellow, adding a little burnt sienna in the shadow.
G. Add dots to the pear using the tip of a round brush.
The dots are green, brown, and black (which is a mix of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue).
H. Add lines around the holes in the cutwork to indicate stitching.
The lines are ultramarine blue with a little burnt sienna for a blue-gray.
I. Add some shadow at the bottoms of the fruit to give them weight.
The dark is ultramarine blue and burnt sienna mixed.
J. Finish off with a second layer of burnt sienna and purple near the edges of the surface wood, and behold your finished painting. Mine is shown in Figure 9-27.
Figure 9-27:
A finished still life featuring a pitcher and fruit.
