Watercolor Painting for Dummies (48 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
In This Chapter
Looking to the heavens: Painting skies, clouds, and precipitation
Landscaping your paintings with rocks, trees, mountains, and deserts
Knowing that not all landscapes show land: Painting buildings
Taking your paints outdoors
Climbing the Rocky Mountain heights
N
ature and landscapes are a great joy to paint. Some landscapes can have a manmade object, such as a barn, in them, while some are pure nature. You can choose whether to add an animal as a center of interest (in which case, see Chapter 12). Pure landscape is just Mother Earth, and in this chapter, she’s the star.
Where you decide to paint can influence the outcome. You may want to take your painting show on the road and paint on location. Whether you’re on the road or in the studio, enjoy nature’s beauty by painting a landscape.
Any time you see something that makes you think, “That would be a great painting,” quickly grab your camera and capture the moment. One time I pulled the car over and photographed a barn that had been standing in place for a century. It burned down the next day. Sometimes you’re at the exact right spot at the right time. So keep a camera with you. You may not have time to stop and sketch or paint, but a snapshot helps you preserve a moment.
Watercolor is the perfect medium for easy sky painting. Unless the entire painting is about sky, you can complete the sky area with a few simple strokes. Explore the many types of clouds. Add bright colors to your sky to create a sunrise or sunset. Weather effects are fun to paint in watercolor. Rain and snow are delightful moods to enjoy in a watercolor. You discover how to add each of these outdoor elements in this section.
Typically the sky is darker at the top where there are more layers of atmosphere to look through. So start with a simple sky background that is a gradation of dark on top moving to light below (graded washes are described in Chapter 3). The simplest sky can be one color of light to dark or a gradation of color as in Figure 10-1. To create Figure 10-1, I started with damp paper, then I painted a light blue — I used cerulean — toward the bottom. Next came peacock blue followed by ultramarine blue and a mixture of ultramarine and burnt sienna at the very top.
Figure 10-1:
Graded wash for a sky using four shades of blue.
Use the blue colors you have and sort them from light to dark to make a wash suitable for a sky background.
The sky is not always blue. Try some other colors for a different background.
Few skies are clear. Clouds come in a variety of shapes and sizes and are good excuses to break up big sky areas and introduce color.
A quick meteorology reminder helps you create realistic-looking clouds. The three most common types of clouds and the types closest to the ground are:
Cumulus clouds
are the big fluffy white clouds below 6,000 feet. These are the rapidly changing clouds that you look at to find shapes that resemble animals, faces, and who knows what else.
The big thunder bumper clouds are a variation called
cumulonimbus
that rise to 50,000 feet. These big clouds rule the sky in the summer and often release hail and rain.
Altocumulus
clouds are more evenly regular bumps and appear from 6,000 to 20,000 feet.
Cirrocumulus
clouds are uniform smaller bumps, appearing above 18,000 feet, and are sometimes called a “mackerel sky” because of its fish scale–like appearance.
Stratus clouds
are the flatter layers that are common on a day when the sun plays peek-a-boo, disappearing and reappearing between the cloud layers.
Variations of this type of cloud are the
nimbostratus,
which is denser and predicts bad weather, and
cirrostratus,
a vaporous high cloud.
Cirrus clouds
are the wispy clouds pushed by high winds. They hang out above 18,000 feet. Sometimes called “mare’s tail,” these clouds are very airy and see-through.
The clouds themselves are your best teacher. My very best advice is to go outside and look to the sky. Clouds are an endless source of fascination. Feel your blood pressure go down. Figure 10-2 is a little chart of cloud types.
Figure 10-2:
Types of clouds.
To paint clouds, you can use many of the techniques described in Chapter 4, especially those that involve preserving the white of your watercolor paper.
Look for opportunities to use a variety of hard edges and soft edges. You can paint the sky area with color and lift the color when it’s wet or dry to lighten areas for clouds. Darken areas by adding some paint in water. Push and lift to sculpt your clouds into the shapes you want. Allow blooms, blossoms, and backwashes to make surprise shapes for clouds. Unequal water creates these bloom areas. By adding more water in a brush than is on the paper surface, a bloom will form. (Check out Chapter 3 for more on blooms.)
Good news: No one will know what your cloud is supposed to look like. All clouds are different. When you’re observing clouds, wait 10 seconds, and even the cloud you’re looking at will change shape, color, and texture.
Look at the clouds in the paintings included in this chapter to see some different shapes and colors. Figure 10-3 was painted on location in Taos, New Mexico, on a cloudy, rain-threatening day.
Figure 10-3:
Clouds cover the Taos, New Mexico, valley.
