glazes – Ink, Yarn & Beer

A Touch of Morning Light

Most of my watercolors tend to have intense colors that are rather bright. With the underwater rocks and floating leaves of the other day, to get the effects I did, I used a lot of thin layers of colors – glazes – to create the desired effects. I was pretty happy with the results, so today I decided to work at creating a painting with good contrast but with many delicate ares of color.

My intention here is to create the effects of early morning with sun just beginning to brighten the landscape. This needs a delicate sky. I had drawn in my sketch first and from there began with thin washes of cobalt, quin rose, and Naples yellow. The wispy clouds were painted wet-in-wet using cobalt and umber. Pleased, I again used pale washes to create the fields in mid and foreground.

Looking at the picture, I realized that the lower 2/3 of the painting were essentially all the same value even though different in color. A scan of the painting and a desaturation of color showed my assumptions were correct.

Sooooo??

A bit of thought. In the end I applied thin glazes of quin gold along the hilltop horizon and a number of layered glazes on thew lower hills in cobalt and umber. This gave depth and distance.

Another painting done slowly and with more deliberation. And I am pleased with the results as well as even learned a few things!

Watercolor, 9×12, Fluid 100% cotton CP paper.

Early Morning

Another wet, wet painting in watercolor.

Here, I wet the paper, and then began putting in areas of color, beginning with the sky in the central part of the painting, and then blobbing down the foliage in the foreground and the distance. The line of the slope was separated from the horizon beyond. As things dried, I blobbed on more colors, and continued to work wet-into-wet as the paper dried. In the end, I was able to draw the trunks of the distant trees without their blurring using diluted colors of the darker tree trunks.

It’s really hard to describe how to do a painting like this. In doing these kinds of paintings I am finding it is necessary to have a sense of the composition itself – lights, darks, soft shapes, hard edges. It is also necessary to think about negative and positive space while painting, as well as the overall effect desired. I worked light to dark, and strove to keep the earliest colors as separate as possible from others. In the end, I used glazes to unify areas with color as well as worked with thick paint and a very dry brush for some detail.

140# CP Arches, 16×20. It took about 3 hours to work on, using time in between to dry the paper with a blow dryer or let the water get absorbed into the paper so softer edges could be achieved.

Of the 3 “splish splash” paintings I have done, this one is my favorite. This technique works very well for areas with a lot of foliage, but what about ocean scenes, skies, and so on? That is next on my agenda for this method.

This was a lot of fun – I hope you like it!

Tulips in a Glass Vase

Flower paintings are some of my favorite things, just because I like flowers. Painting them is another story. Tulips are such cheerful, seasonal flowers, appearing in the market for a short time; I always have to buy a bunch or two or three.

Determined to paint a vase and water with stems, to really look at them, I put the tulips in a rather coarse, rectangular glass vase. The edges of the vase are wavy, and it is far from perfect, which gives it a rather pleasant charm. It seems I rather avoided the stems – my picture got too big! I’ll give it another try later.

Parts of this painting work, but overall it feels rather labored in appearance. I’m not quite sure why – maybe too many glazes took away a sense of spontaneity as well as clumsy negative painting.

Red Poppies

I always have loved vistas of wildflowers, and the red poppies seen in so many French paintings always seem wonderful to me. Red like that is hard to find (I think) in the natural world. Painting it is even harder. I ended up using mostly Cadmium Red Orange.

This is another direct watercolor from this morning, but because of the multiple layers of washes, I had to let it dry in between. I went about getting ready for work between layers. At first, I just did a sky and put in colors of grasses and poppies – but they all bled together, so the second attempt – the one above – is the final version. If you look at the pictures below – click on them to see them in sequence – you can see what I did. I scanned each wash layer before doing the next.

Original Attempt

Village Windows

Here is yesterday’s first layer of watercolor pencil, now “watercolored”. I tried to follow the lines of the pencil.

Here is the second layer of watercolor pencil, with a little bit more detail. The sky was done with about 4 or 5 colors, layered down with a blue, some white, some grey. The roofs are an orange and a brown and a black.

As you can see, I also colored in the windows and am trying to add texture to the tiled roofs. Some green, too, for the foliage in front. After this, I then added water. Once more, I followed the lines, such in the roofs. The space on the lower right is a bit of a problem. I think it needs something, but have no idea at this point. Maybe a cafe awning so we can a shot of espresso?

As I have never used watercolor pencils for any complete picture, my cunningly brilliant plan is to simply layer color, then use water. As you can see, there is some bleeding. Most interesting to me is the sky – in the center the little bleeds are rather interesting. In the windows, I also did some lifting of color with a dry brush to lighten the glass, as a reflection or to enhance a shadow. The iron gall ink is beginning to blur into the colors.

I have no idea how many layers I will end up with, but I am going to try to do glazes / layers to represent shadow and form. No idea how successful this will be!