I got a new watercolor sketchbook the other day, a Pentalic spiral bound with 140# paper. I took it out to the patio and painted one of my Christmas cacti to see how the paint and paper responded. It’s pretty nice paper, and it was pleasant to sit outdoors for a bit before the rains hit tonight. This is also a study in direct watercolor – brush, paint, paper, without lines.
Today my Instagram account is making its debut! I uploaded a picture of this sketch by phone to Instagram, but a phone picture is not the same as a scan. My Instagram account is (what else): journeybypaper. Not sure how it works, but it is here, to the right.
Winter is leaving and the bulbs are emerging. In my own yard, freesias are in bloom, their sweet scent greeting me as I come and go from the house. Other bulbs are found in the stores, as cut flowers or in pots. Daffodils and tulips are the most common. Hyacinths are rare. Where I live, there is never snow on the ground, and if we are lucky, we get rain and a cold wind. Having grown up in the middle of blizzard country, I miss the bulbs – but I don’t miss the weather! So, here are some paintings of daffo-down-dillies and one of some tulips. None are great, but all were fun to do!
More daffodils! This time I did a value sketch before I began to paint. I think it did help me with the final painting. The sketch is not to scale for the picture, but it does give the areas of light and dark. You can see the light is sort of to the left, and perhaps a bit to the front.
Next, the basic outline of the daffodils on the paper.
Finally, the painting itself. It’s better in some ways than the earlier ones I did, but it just isn’t what I want to accomplish. Parts of it look forced – specifically, the flowers. Still there is a better sense of painterly-ness here! And, the value sketch helped a lot.
Currently I am using Canson XL paper, which is a student grade paper. For really wet washes, it doesn’t work that well, yet I find it quite to my liking as a practice paper for the most part.
The other day, I came into possession of a copy of Marc Taro Holmes’ newest book, Direct Watercolor. In spirit, I am much of the same philosophy – little prep, direct painting, thinking ahead, seizing the moment, using colors directly, relying on imagination and happenstance and experience to create a painting. All this requires is just doing it! The “doing it” is the training – you do it, you think, you do again. Like anything, practicing it enhances your skills and brings the mind-muscle memory together in ways that, if you were to consciously thing about, you could never achieve.
Marc mentioned some things I found particularly useful. One is to create a silhouette of what you are working on – create the outer edges and then move inward. Decide if edges are going to meet so that colors can bleed into one another. Keep your edges dry if you don’t want things to bleed from one thing into another. Let the painting dry, but don’t go over it extensively. Other points he made is to work light to dark, large to small, but if you are working on something, do it directly – don’t dance all over the paper.
The silhouette appealed to me immensely, as well as the brushwork. Here are some examples of brushwork and silhouette working together. Once the edges of whatever I was painting were done, I then came in with varied colors to shade or define. The colors really please me in many of these little sketches – the blending, the bleeding, the hard edge against the paper’s white.
Flowers make sense for the silhouette and then move in to blend colors. Above, wet-on-dry. Also, working directly while everything is still wet – as in the tulip on the far right.
Below, some examples of trees to create the illusion of a building (left) and another silhouette then molded to create a shape with shadow (top right). Marc also mentions brushwork to show direction – and the importance to suggest. The grassy strokes on the top left. Finally, a bigger silhouette – here, Morro Rock – created and worked on first (bottom right) before moving into other areas, specifically the dunes and plants in the foreground.
Quick sketches with valuable lessons. While Marc’s book is not a “how to” book, it is a valuable resource for specific techniques. The fact he is such a talented painter makes it look easy, but the truth is, he went from precise lines, to lines and colors, to direct watercolor with a great deal of effort and an entire change of mindset.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 