Watercolor Painting for Dummies (50 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
Most landscapes have similar land elements in them. Look at the wonderful earth you live on and see a multitude of scenes ready for you to immortalize in paintings. Eventually you run into rocks, trees, deserts, and piles of rocks that become mountains. (I talk about painting water in Chapter 11.) Although you can produce these elements several ways, the following sections offer some quick ways to make them come to life in your paintings.
Rocks are hard, pardon the pun. But that fact helps you think hard edges and interesting shapes when you paint rocks. When making a group of rocks, make the rocks a variety of sizes, shapes, heights, and colors. Some techniques that add to rock texture are plastic wrap and spraying water drops. (See more on these techniques in Chapter 4.)
You can try many techniques but this one is a quick and fun way to make a pile of rocks:
1.
Choose a piece of watercolor paper about 3 x 5 inches, and activate a variety of colors that are slightly grayed.
Color choices can include pink-red, gray, blue, brown, and yellow.
2.
Use a 1-inch flat brush and paint the entire area of rocks with the various colors side by side across the paper.
Tip the paper while wet to let the colors blend into each other. This underpainting defines the shape of the whole pile.
3.
Spray or flick water drops into the damp paint.
The drops of water create a texture pattern by making mini-blooms as the paint dries.
4.
Crumple plastic wrap and place it on the damp paint and leave it in place until the paint is dry.
If the plastic doesn’t want to lay on the paper, weight it down by placing a jar or cup on top. (Chapter 4 has more on this technique.)
5.
Remove the plastic wrap when the paint is dry.
You should see darker color where the plastic touched the paint, something like Figure 10-7a.
Figure 10-7:
From smudges to boulders.
6.
Mix a dark color of paint and divide the large shape into smaller rocks.
A line of dark brown painted on with a round brush defines and separates the shape of the pile into individual rocks, as shown in Figure 10-7b. Create different sizes of rocks, but make one rock bigger and dominant.
7.
Soften one side of the defining lines from Step 6 to make the roundness of the rock shadow.
8.
Glaze the rocks with color and spray with water for texture.
Glaze with any color you want to change the color of the rocks. Break up the same colors by glazing something different in between them.
Figure 10-7c shows the final rock pile.
Trees are a popular element in landscapes as in life. Not only do they provide shade and oxygen, they add an interesting vertical element to a landscape.
After you start painting trees, you’ll look at them in a new way. Really observe trees. Then look for ways to simplify the shapes to use them in your paintings. The next sections talk about the two kinds of trees.
Deciduous trees
have leaves that fall in autumn. There are many species, but most can be drawn and painted in similar shapes with similar guidelines:
The trunk and branches:
Contrary to popular belief, a tree’s trunk usually isn’t brown. Make the trunk gray with some variety to the color. As the tree grows from the ground to the sky, the trunk gets smaller. If the trunk widens as it goes up, it looks out of perspective. Each time the trunk or a branch splits, the divisions are smaller in size.
The leaves:
Think of the mass of foliage as a shape. Simplify the billions of leaves. Rather than paint each leaf, make a whole shape of foliage to represent the mass of leaves. Make the outside edges go in and out to define the shape of the tree. Try not to make the familiar lollipop tree that is so popular in kindergarten classes. Leave some holes in the leaves where the sky can show through. The leaves’ color indicates what season it is. Let several colors mix within the foliage shape.
Remember that light falls on the top of the tree, so make this area lighter and warmer.
Techniques that work well in tree foliage are salt, water spray, and spatter. See Chapter 4 for technique details.
Figures 10-8a, 10-8b, and 10-8c show some deciduous trees. These are simplified trees, but the shape and color are all you need to identify a specific species.
Figure 10-8:
Deciduous trees.
Coniferous
trees
are green all year, like evergreens, pines, and junipers. Their color is usually dark green, and you can make a great dark green by mixing hookers green dark and alizarin crimson.
The shape of the tree defines which species it is. Figure 10-9a, 10-9b, and 10-9c show a ponderosa pine, a juniper, and a blue spruce, respectively.
Figure 10-9:
Coniferous trees.
To make these trees look realistic, keep the edges and shape varied and asymmetrical. Sometimes the trunk shows through the foliage depending on the type of tree, but often, you never have to paint a trunk if you’re painting evergreens.
As with deciduous trees (see the previous section), trunks increase in size as the roots spread toward the ground, and water spray and salt are useful techniques.
Mountains come in a variety of sizes and age. The gentle rounded mountains of the eastern United States were carved by wind and time. They’re covered by colorful deciduous trees. The rugged rough mountains of the West have pine trees and no trees above the timberline at 10,000 feet.
Mountains make great backgrounds and often appear in layers. An easy watercolor technique is to:
1.
Start with a light layer of watercolor for the mountains farthest away.
2.
Let it dry.
3.
Paint the next layer and successive layers with less water and more pigment.
By decreasing the amount of water in the paint mixture for each layer and making the paint darker, you create depth of space because the layers become grayer as they go farther away. Aerial or atmospheric perspective (explained in Chapter 8) is great to use with mountains.
Remember that as things get farther away they become smaller, cooler in color temperature, and less detailed. Make layers of mountains by painting on damp paper to make edges that seem to fade into the distance.
1.
Choose a piece of 5-x-7-inch watercolor paper, turn it vertically, and activate your paints.
You’ll need cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, hookers green, yellow ochre, lemon yellow, and cadmium red.
2.
Paint the sky.
Dampen the paper using a 1/2-inch flat brush. Before the paper dries, brush in cobalt blue at the top and gradually add water to make a graded wash. (See Chapter 3 for more details on graded washes.)
3.
Let the sky dry.
4.
Paint the farthest range of mountains.
Mix ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, and a touch of burnt sienna for a blue-purple-gray. Add a lot of water so that it’s a 20 percent value (pretty pale; see Chapter 5 or the Cheat Sheet for value percents).
Keep the paint somewhat dry in the 1/2-inch flat brush. Apply the paint quickly and keep the brush hairs nearly parallel to the paper to create rough texture (see Figure 10-10a).
By using rough texture and having the paint touch only the top of the paper’s texture, you create the illusion of snow-covered mountains far away.
5.
Soften the bottom edge of the paint by adding water to blend away the edges of the mountains.
This makes it easier to cover the paint with the next layer and adds a foggy effect near the bottom of the mountain range.
6.
Paint the next layer of purple mountains.
Use the same mixture of color here that you did in Step 4, but add a little more alizarin crimson and use a little less water so the color is a little darker than the first layer (see Figure 10-10b).
Paint this layer before the paper dries from painting the first layer of rough mountains. You want the paper to hold an edge, but if it’s a little damp, the edge will be a soft edge, which looks farther away.
Soften the bottom of the mountains with water as you did in Step 5.
7. Paint the third layer of mountains using green.
Mix hookers green with a little alizarin crimson to make a dark green. The green warms up the layer to help it come forward in space. Paint this layer with a slightly jagged top edge to indicate tree shapes (see Figure 10-10c). You want to paint these mountains while the second layer of mountains is still wet, thus giving them a soft top edge. Soften the bottom with water.
8.
The tree layer gets added after the mountains are dry.
Mix a dark green from hookers green and alizarin crimson. Paint the tree shapes over the mountains as seen in Figure 10-10d. Remember to make the trees different heights and widths, and set them at various distances from each other. Soften the bottom with water as in Step 5.
9.
Add the foreground colors.
Yellow ochre was painted at the leading edge of the paper. The same green that was used in the third mountain layer was painted in the foreground with a little less water. While the foreground was wet, I spattered in lemon yellow and cadmium red and water for texture. (Spattering details are covered in Chapter 3.) I even put some birds in the sky to balance the big tree.
You can adjust this exercise to make as many layers and shapes of mountains as you like. What power you have. You now can move mountains! Figure 10-10d shows the finished painting done with this step-by-step method.
Figure 10-10:
Layered mountains.
