Watercolor Painting for Dummies (59 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
Not every pet in the house is furry. You may be lucky enough to have reptiles (lucky?) or fish.
The shiny scales of a colorful goldfish make for a great watercolor topic. You may have koi outdoors in a pond, but I keep the fish in this section in a bowl and put it under the indoor category for the following exercise. You can use the same painting techniques for lizards, snakes, reptiles, and other types of fish.
1.
Trace and transfer the fish at the end of this activity (Figure 12-7) onto a 5-x-7-inch piece of watercolor paper.
I outlined this fish with a waterproof pen. I find this a successful way to work. If you use this method, you can use the pen first or last. The drawing outlines the finished piece, and the watercolor can almost do anything and still work. You can also paint the watercolor first and draw on top. You can certainly skip the pen and ink altogether and make the paint do all the work.
2.
Activate your paints.
I used antique red ochre (burnt sienna is similar) and ultramarine blue in the fish’s body. Don’t mix them together; make separate puddles of each color.
You may also want to use purple, yellow, red, hot pink, and orange to make the fish shimmer. Choose whatever shades suit your fancy.
3.
Wet the body of the fish with clear water to make it damp.
4.
Using a pointed round brush, drop and paint color on your fish.
Using
antique red ochre or burnt sienna, let the paint diffuse into the dampness (
wet-into-wet
as discussed in Chapter 3). Create a round body by putting darker blue paint toward the edges and leaving the middle lighter, as I did in Figure 12-6a.
If the color travels into the area you want to be left light, pick it up or blot it with a damp brush or paper towel.
Figure 12-6:
Detailing fanciful fish features.
5.
Let the paint dry.
Use a blow-dryer, or relax and read the newspaper.
6.
Paint the scales.
Make a scalloped line using the tip of your round brush and a color that shows up (I used several, but mostly burnt sienna) vertically across the body of the fish, using Figure 12-6b as your guide.
Make the next line so that the point touches the round part of the previous line. Paint two or three lines. While the lines are still wet, pick up some other colors with your brush and touch the damp scale lines at random to release the color into the line. Rinse your brush between colors. I dropped purple, yellow, red, hot pink, and orange into the scalloped lines.
7.
Let your fish friend dry.
Use a blow-dryer to speed up drying time, or dust the house.
8.
If you don’t want all the scales so detailed, soften some with a stiff brush by nudging clear water over the scales you want to disappear.
9.
Paint the fins.
Paint all the fins with the orange color. I left the top tailfin white paper. Drop in a bit of blue as a shadow near the fish’s body. Figure 12-6c shows an example of a colored fin.
10.
Paint the eye.
I gave Goldie a yellow eye since he didn’t have much gold anywhere else. The eye and the iris with highlight are shown in Figure 12-6d.
All the black is done with the ink pen. If you didn’t leave the white highlight or it got filled in, not to worry. When the eye is bone-dry, take a razor blade corner and pick out the white. One flick will make a highlight.
You should end up with something resembling Figure 12-7.
Figure 12-7:
A colorful goldfish is the perfect watercolor subject.
Wildlife sanctuaries, zoos, and animal parks are great places to study animals. If you’re well-to-do, you may be able to afford safaris and expeditions, but for most of us, the zoo is a good bet.
This section focuses on tips and techniques you can use when painting larger animals, including the following tips to keep in mind when you’re painting a single animal:
Paint around the edges, including the underside, of the animal with a darker color to indicate roundness.
Paint shadows where the light doesn’t reach as easily.
Make the eyes your focal point or center of interest.
People are connected by eye contact. Pay extra attention to the eyes, which is where the audience looks first.
Divide the background into smaller areas and do each area separately so you have less real estate to manage.
If you have a natural break in the picture where the animal breaks up the background, this is a good place to stop and start background areas.
Practice continuity.
If a color goes behind the leg in the front, make the same color reappear on the other side of the leg as well.
Ground the animal with a shadow.
Painting a cast shadow anchors the animal on the ground; otherwise, it floats in the air.
When painting on-site, people love to share information with you because you share their interest. You can discover so much and make new friends by painting on location.
In painting the giraffe in Figure 12-8, I painted a blue-gray color first to shape the body of the animal, as if no spots existed. This is sometimes called
modeling
— like a sculptor models the shape of clay. Next I masked the white areas between the spots using the masking fluid and let it dry. After the mask was completely dry, I painted the spots using burnt sienna. The variation of light to dark is simply the amount of water added to the burnt sienna. After time to dry, I peeled off the mask and painted the background. Some leaf shapes are painted, and some are lifted out of the dark green by applying water and blotting. Some leaves were painted around with background outlining the leaf. (This technique uses positive and negative painting as described in Chapter 5.) I painted the grass last to cover the giraffe’s legs. While the foreground was still wet, I used a liner brush to pull paint up in long thin lines to make blades of grass.
Figure 12-8:
A giraffe on the savannah.
