Watercolor Painting for Dummies (54 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
In This Chapter
Wading through costal living motifs
Embracing waves of watercolor information
Going costal bird watching
Painting yourself into the sunset
I
magine being on the beach. Hear the crash of the ocean waves. They come up to your bare feet, and the water tries to take the sand out from under them as it recedes into the sea. Watch the waves ebb and flow rhythmically. The empty windows of the beach houses along the ridge above reflect the sky. Sand grasses sway in the temperate breeze. The salty air is heavy with humidity, but the wind is cool against your cheek. A child plays in the sand in front of you using her bright yellow plastic bucket and red shovel to build a sand castle embellished with seashells. Past her, the sea encroaches on the land, and gulls swarm above a rusty fishing boat as it pulls into the old harbor for the evening. You turn your gaze out to the sunset as the evening sky blazes orange over the azure water. In the mood to paint a seascape? I sure am!
Half of the planet’s entire population lives near the ocean. Even though I live far from the ocean in landlocked Colorado, it’s one of my favorite places to visit and therefore paint. Many artists, myself included, have a spiritual, mystical, enchanting, compelling urge to paint water. Maybe it’s because our own bodies are mostly water. Whatever the reason, watercolor is made for painting water.
In this chapter, you discover how to paint things you find by the seaside: water, waves, sand, boats, birds, rocky shores, and seashells.
When you think of a seascape, you immediately think of ocean waves and water in general. Some seascapes may be mostly water, but some don’t have any water in them at all. A seascape painting can include any number of other items you care to add to the scene: beach, sky, birds, boats, lighthouses. Maybe a pile of fishing equipment implies a nearby ocean without actually showing it.
I think of all these types of paintings as seascapes, but they can also fall into other categories like still life for the fishing equipment or wildlife for the birds. You’re the cook. You pick the ingredients to make your recipe for a gourmet seascape painting. I’ll show you some of the ingredients I like. And as the simple scene of Tybee Island, Georgia, in Figure 11-1 demonstrates, seascapes don’t have to be complicated.
Figure 11-1:
Seascape with grass and fence.
When you paint a traditional seascape, you generally divide your watercolor page into horizontal stripes: One stripe for the sky, one for the water, and one for the shoreline. For variety and a better composition, make sure the stripes aren’t the same widths. When I painted Figure 11-1, I started by dividing the page into sections to represent the sky, land, and water.
Keep the horizon of the water parallel to the top and bottom of the page. A slanted horizon makes it look like the water will leak right out of the picture plane.
I love putting water in my paintings. Being born under a water zodiac sign may have something to do with it. But how do you paint clear water? It depends on where you find the water. Most large bodies of water, including lakes and ponds, reflect the sky or whatever is near them or on them, especially if the water is fairly still. When the water is moving, the reflections are more broken up. If the water is really moving, the waves make whitecaps and show no reflections. So even though the water is clear, it’s a reflection of its surroundings influenced by its movement.
Water isn’t always blue. In fact, it’s often filled with plankton and algae which can make the water shades of pink and green. If you can see through the water to the bottom, it may take on rock and sand colors. Careful observation is a good guide. What’s better than having to sit still and observe the water? Use the value chart located on the Cheat Sheet at the front of the book to identify the values in the water. You might be surprised at how dark clear water can be.
If you’re lucky enough to be painting in the tropics, you may wonder how to achieve that fabulous Caribbean blue color. My secret recipe for turquoise water is cerulean blue mixed with viridian green. I guess it isn’t a secret anymore, but it does make a beautiful turquoise color.
Lighten the color of the water as it comes forward in the painting, and let the color be darker as the water gets deeper in the distance.
Quiet, calm water is a mirror reflecting what is sitting on or near the water. It would be rare to find a still body of water that wasn’t reflecting something around it. Not to mention boring. The more movement in the water, the more the reflections wiggle in the water. Each wave and ripple acts as an individual mirror.
Paint calm water using mostly horizontal strokes. Diagonal and vertical directions just don’t work unless the water is spilling or splashing.
A calm harbor reflects wiggling lines as in Figure 11-2. I started with a sketch of the boats so I would know where to save the whites. The water was painted by first making a graduated wash starting at the pier and coming forward using light cerulean blue, then cobalt, then ultramarine blue, then burnt sienna, and a little Payne’s gray. Next I painted the boats. Then I painted the distant, very diluted purple-gray background. Next I painted the riggings on the boats.
Figure 11-2:
Boats reflected in still water.
After you get the subject matter in place, you can reflect it into the water. The reflection is a grayed-down version of the item mirrored in the water. And painting the darker reflection last follows the watercolor rule of painting light colors first and dark colors last. To gray a color, just add a bit of its
complement,
the color opposite it on the color wheel (see the color wheel on the Cheat Sheet at the front of this book or the one in Chapter 5). To establish a little movement in the water, wiggle the lines.
I lifted the white waves by dragging a damp stiff bristle brush across the area and blotting with a paper towel. Quick and easy. The pier was added next to fill in the white area between the background and water. Last, I echoed the blue-gray of the water with a quick sweep of the same color in the sky.
