Watercolor Painting for Dummies (49 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
It was a dark and stormy night. Okay, trite as a story opening. But a rainy, moody sky is a great topic to paint. Your watercolors almost paint this for you.
1.
Pull out a piece of 5-x-7-inch watercolor paper.
2.
Mix a little burnt sienna into ultramarine blue until you get a blue-gray color that you think will make a moody, rainy sky.
3.
Paint the area of your paper where you’re putting sky with clear water so it’s damp.
Use a 1/2-inch flat brush to cover the sky area quickly. Tip the paper so the water evenly coats the paper, leaving no puddles or dry spots in the sky area.
4.
Just as the shine of the water is about to dry, run a stroke of the blue-gray color mixture across the top of the sky.
The paint will run into the damp area, but you can help it by tilting the paper so the paint runs down the paper and looks like rain.
Put another stroke of color across the top if the paint is too light. Let gravity and the paint do the work.
If the paint doesn’t run, try spraying the area with your water spray bottle. You can always let the paper dry and try it again.
5.
When the paint is where you want it, let the paper dry at a slight incline.
Propping the painting on an inch-thick book prevents the paint from flowing back toward the top. You can lay the paper flat to dry, but any wet paint will continue to travel where it can. By adding a slant, gravity helps preserve your sky as you painted it.
Figure 10-4 shows a rainy sky using ultramarine blue and burnt sienna.
Figure 10-4:
Rainy sky.
If you want to go a little more dramatic, add a storm to a painting; they’re fairly unusual and full of excitement. Put in some great billowing dark cumulus clouds (see the earlier section titled “Capturing clouds”), add some rain in the distance, and there’s no doubt that the result is tumultuous.
You can use Payne’s gray to paint dark skies gray, but you can create a much livelier gray by mixing ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. As this mixed gray dries, the colors separate and make a nice glow. You don’t get this glow when you use gray straight from a tube.
One subject everyone likes is a sunrise or sunset. Of course, any rules and generalities can be broken, but generally sunrises are pinker, and sunsets are hotter with more orange and yellow.
Remember your color wheel when painting the sunset. It’s easy to want to start with blue sky at the top and a yellow glow around the sun, which is just fine until the two washes meet and make a green sky. Run for cover — it looks like hail! Color wheel to the rescue. Refresh your memory in Chapter 5 or take a look at the Cheat Sheet at the front of the book. Instead of the quick route from blue to yellow, which results in green, take the long route the other direction: From blue, go to violet, red, orange, then yellow.
Watch a real sunset (or a sunrise if you’re an early bird). Notice the colors nature uses, what order they appear in, and what colors they’re next to.
To paint a sky, dampen the sky area with clear water first. Then paint sky colors onto the damp paper. I usually make horizontal bands of color. Rinse the brush between colors and blot the brush on the sponge to absorb excess liquid before adding more paint to the sky. You can make some color bands larger and some barely show, but if you gradually change colors in the order they appear on the color wheel, your sunrises and sunsets will look very natural, and you won’t get any surprise colors. Skip ahead to Figure 10-6 to see a natural-looking sunset.
Snow is another really easy thing to paint in watercolor. After all, the paper is white already! Although Eskimos have a hundred different words to describe all kinds of snow, I break it down into two kinds: falling snow and fallen snow.
Figure 10-5 shows four methods you can use to create the illusion of the white stuff drifting through the air toward the ground. (The methods are described in detail in Chapter 4.)
While the paint is still damp, sprinkle a few grains of
salt
on the paint (see Figure 10-5a). Salt is somewhat unpredictable, and if it doesn’t work the first time, you can try one of the other ways of making snow as a backup. You also can use salt to simulate other natural textures: Stars, leaves, and wildflowers in a meadow are just a few ideas.
Spatter
masking fluid
on your paper before painting on watercolor (Figure 10-5b). Remove it when the paint is dry. Masking fluid takes some planning and requires extra drying time.
After the watercolor is dry, spatter
white paint
(Figure 10-5c).
The white paint here is Chinese white watercolor. Paint is a good last resort and can be used in combination with one of the other techniques.
While the watercolor is still damp, spray
water
droplets
(Figure 10-5d). Water drops are also a bit unpredictable, and this sample shows some sizable differences.
As you can see, the technique results are similar but have subtle and not-so-subtle visual differences.
Snow already on the ground is defined by shadows. Because snow is white, it’s the reflection of all colors and can have a number of colors in the shadows. This gives you an opportunity to unify your painting by including the colors you’re using elsewhere in the snow.
An easy way to make a mound of snow is to paint a curve of ultramarine blue with a flat brush. Leave one side hard-edged, but quickly soften the opposite side for a soft edge. A snow scene can have as many mounds of snow as you wish.
Figure 10-5:
Four ways to make falling snow.
Figure 10-6 has white highlights that were saved by masking fluid and mounds of snow painted in blues and purples. The sunset includes sun rays that were lifted in the dark tree background.
Figure 10-6:
Fallen snow is defined by shadows using hard and soft edges.
