Watercolor Painting for Dummies (56 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
Not all beaches have sand. Some are rocky, some are marshy, some have grasses and other vegetation. I cover rock painting in Chapter 10, so turn there for tips if you’re painting a rocky shore.
I chose paintings from a variety of coastal regions for this chapter. Each shoreline is unique and to be appreciated. So make use of your observation skills and the tips throughout this book when painting shorelines with vegetation.
Just remember, when you start painting the sandy, marshy beaches of the east coast to put the ocean on the other side — just kidding.
Boats are favorite seascape subjects. You can capture working boats like fishing trawlers, tugboats, and freighters. You can paint pleasure boats like yachts and sailboats. You can render small watercraft like canoes and dinghies. All are excuses to get the colors flowing.
Look for the general shapes to begin drawing the boat. The main boat can be a shape like a rectangle with a triangular bow (front). (Chapter 8 explains more about breaking images down into simple shapes.)
Keep the boat deck parallel to the water horizon or it may capsize and sink.
Look for comparisons in value and color when deciding how to paint the water and boat relationship. The reflection of the boat on the water should be slightly grayer and less detailed than the boat itself.
A boat needs more room ahead of it than behind it to make the viewer feel comfortable. This also gives viewers a sense of having somewhere to go in their journey through the painting.
Hoist the main sail! Lower the jib. I would, if I knew what they were. Maybe I’d better read
Sailing For Dummies,
huh? I do know that the feeling of wind and the light through the sails make for one fine subject to paint. In Figure 11-11, I chose to paint exactly that. I took a photo of this picturesque sailboat in San Francisco Bay and used it for this painting of a sailboat, water, and fog.
Figure 11-11:
Sailboat and fog.
A sailboat is simple shapes — triangles, rectangles, and lines. The triangles of the sails are automatically interesting because the sides of each sail are different lengths, the two sails are different sizes, and the bottom edges are slightly rounded. The roundness also gives the viewer the feeling of wind and direction.
The fog looks difficult, but is really easy in watercolor. The technique is a really good example of the soft edge I talk about in Chapter 3. The mountains were painted with a hard edge at the top and a soft edge at the bottom. The ocean was painted with a hard edge. After both of these areas were dry, I dampened the fog area with clear water and dropped a bit of blue-gray into the bottom near the ocean, making it softer and lighter as it reached the middle. I put the boat details in last. Red flags, boat windows, and the railing are icing on the cake.
Give me a stinky fishing port, rusty time-worn boats, and obnoxious bellowing sea lions, and I am one happy camper! My idea of shipshape is old fishing trawlers that have great shapes. Figure 11-12 shows some top models at the beach in Rocky Point, Arizona. These are the kinds of top models I enjoy looking at!
Figure 11-12:
Rusty trawlers — my idea of top beach models.
If you paint one of these scenes, before long you’ll need to paint rust. Burnt sienna is the perfect pigment for painting oxidized metal, commonly known as rust.
Try this great technique to show the effect of a rusty nail in a pier or a boat:
1.
Paint the nail head dot using burnt sienna, and let it dry.
2.
Put another dot of burnt sienna on the head of the nail, and while the paint is still wet, put your index finger on the wet paint and quickly pull the color down the paper in a fast flicking motion.
You can imitate in a second what it took nature 20 years to oxidize.
Part of the charm of the beach is the birds. And these feathered friends can serve a variety of functions in a seascape, from being the center of interest to providing a visual element to help balance a painting, or bringing some life and movement to a stretch of sea or sky.
Figure 11-13 shows some great choices for inclusion in your seascapes, but keep in mind that I can only squeeze so many examples into this brief space. You can include many other species of birds in your paintings. Get a good bird book to help with the details — I hear there’s a couple of
For Dummies
books about birds and bird watching. You can take up bird watching or enroll in a class. I just finished a bird-watching class at the local community college. While the instructor lectured, I sketched the birds he showed in slides. It was great practice, and I retained so much more information by drawing as he spoke. I even got a few offers from classmates to buy my notes. Sporting goods stores are great to explore for taxidermy specimens and art that has already been produced.
Figure 11-13:
Beach birds.
The birds in Figure 11-13 include:
A.
Pelicans:
The brown pelican is floating and the American white is flying. The difference is the obvious color. In the Pacific Ocean, the brown pelican gets a brilliant red orange under its bill, while in the Atlantic, the American’s bill is black with a little orange on the tip. Both have yellow tops of the head.
B.
Herons and egrets:
You can see an amazing variety of these birds near almost any body of water. The painter’s guide to herons and egrets boils down to this: There are big ones and small ones. The figure shows a great blue heron and a snowy egret. I threw in a flamingo, which is also part of the heron family, but you know what they look like from the plastic one in the front yard. You don’t have one? Weird.
C.
Ducks:
Ducks come in 16 species of
dabbling ducks
and 23 species of
diving ducks.
Dabblers tip forward but rarely dive. Diving ducks are generally a bit smaller and do as their name suggests. Figure 11-13 shows a mallard and a wood duck, both from the dabblers, and a ruddy duck represents the divers. Although most of the ducks have a similar silhouette, the ruddy has a tail that becomes vertical or goes into the water and acts as a rudder. Most ducks are various shades of brown and black, though I chose some with more color and interesting shapes.
D.
Shorebirds:
This group includes 62 species. They are small to middle-size birds with very long legs and thin, pointed long bills. Some bills are straight and some curve up or down. I include a greater yellowlegs and an American avocet to represent the shorebirds. These birds can be found near the edges of marshes and beaches poking those long bills into the sand in hopes of finding food.
E.
Gulls:
Gulls are everyone’s favorite. And, by the way, it’s just “gull” not “sea gull.” If you say sea gull, the Audubon police will take away your birder card. But that’s better than the art police taking away your composition card. (Just kidding; you don’t have to worry about art police, just art critics.)
Of the 27 species of gulls, the herring gull and common tern show up here. All the gulls are very similar with subtle differences in black and gray patterns, and beak and leg color. Terns are a little more streamlined, but could be mistaken for a gull.
In Figure 11-14 I had a lot of fun giving you a gull chart. Instead of making the letter “M” in the sky to represent birds, you can take a little more time and use shapes like these. The images are still simple, but they give a better impression of gulls going about their acrobatic business.
Figure 11-14:
Gobs of gulls.
Notice the pier pilings in Figure 11-14. Making old weathered pilings is an easy trick to do in watercolor:
1.
Paint the piling in yellow ochre and burnt sienna and let it dry.
2.
Paint over that with a fairly thick opaque dark brown.
3.
When the wet shine is about to leave, use the round corner of an old credit card to scrape through the paint to reveal the underpainting from Step 1.
Don’t use the thin edge of the credit card because it’s more likely to produce a dark line instead of the more natural, uneven line you want.
