Tag: mud

Working with Contrast, or, A Day Without Mud

Today, my little Meetup group was really little.  Initially there were to be 4 of us, but one cancelled, and then the third unfortunately got very lost using her GPS.  She wrote she was 3/4 of an hour late . . . and we waited 10 minutes, too.  Next time I post a Meetup meeting, I’ll spell out directions, so hopefully that won’t happen again.

So, contrast.  I am dreadful with it.  And with painting things so that they look like things rather than blobs of color.  However, that is probably something that time and experience will cure.  Today, though, I did manage to not turn everything into mud – a major accomplishment, let me tell you!

We went to a local place, the trail by the Chumash Museum nearby my house.  (The Chumash are a California tribe.)  We were there for about an hour.  I began with a pencil sketch, and then, color.  We were settled in a small oak grove, with dark and light contrast about as contrasty as you can get.  At the end of the hour, this is what I had painted, knowing full well I would look at it and work it a bit once home.

As you can see, I did leave areas of white!  Another first . . . As I was painting I made a monumental decision, too:  paint long horizontal stripes to represent the grasses under the trees, and the shadows crossing the foreground.  I sat there and painted stripes.  It was nerve wracking.  The blobby white areas were deliberately left for consideration later.

And once home, I looked at the painting.  Still a need for contrast, and a bit more detail.  More pen, more ink brush, more colors, and some warmth.

Overall, the one above came out okay, but if you look on the mid-right, to the left of the furthest trunk, there is a bit of an odd space, so I went in and worked it a bit with ink to try to mitigate it.  I found it very distracting.  Here is the final image below.

The area has a few more lines in it, a bit busier, but somehow more in keeping with similar areas of the painting.

My palette was somewhat unknown!  That is, I was not really sure the names of the colors as I was using them, but I do have a list of how they are laid out on the palette, which is why I can tell you now!  I used Koi watercolor brushes and the following paints:  Quinacridone Gold, Naples Yellow, Hansa Yellow Medium, Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Teal, Ultramarine Blue, Indanthrene Blue, Phthalo Green, and Burnt Sienna.  I used a Stillman & Birn Beta Series 8×10 inch softcover notebook, and scanned the images using my trusty, not rusty, Epson V600.

Remembrance of Things Past

If I want to be honest – which sometimes I don’t want to be! – I never realized that in watercolor, as in sumi-e painting (which I haven’t done for a few years), the brush is important.  In sumi-e, brushwork is important as it expresses what color cannot – color is not found in sumi-e, only shades of blacks and greys and white, with the subject hinted at, not indicated in boldface!  Playing with leaves made me remember this . . .

Because my chronic struggle in watercolor always seems to be overworking and mixing too many colors together, I decided to pick up a book called Everyday Watercolor:  Learn to Paint Watercolor in 30 Days, by Jenna Rainey.  I figured some kind of disciplined plan could work.  Her style of painting is not necessarily my style of painting, but that was not important as far as I am concerned.  My concern was to stop making mud and to relearn what I have forgotten over the years.  The examples in Rainey’s book are pretty basic, pretty straightforward, and actually, a lot of fun to do.  It has helped me drop that little, nagging, nasty perfectionist who always criticizes.  Rather, it is far better to just do, and quit the role of critic.   She does studies such as shapes, allowing colors to bleed into one another; she discusses design in the abstract exercises with squares and circles.  There are simple exercises in drawing and painting trees with foliage in shadow, and depth, with lighter pine trees in the distance, and darker ones in front.

What do I find the most valuable in this book?  Crazily simple lessons.  Step 1.  Step 2.  Step 3.  Limited palettes of color.  Most how-to-watercolor books are wonderfully full of tantalizing pictures, but few that I have seen really drill down to making it simple.  I enjoy the work of watercolorists such as Winslow Homer – people with a loose, free style which I would love to emulate.  I am not a contained person in the sense of wanting to fill in the lines, like in a coloring book, but I also appreciate the disciplined approach of people like Birgit O’Connor, who paints huge flowers, beach debris, and so on.  I am still struggling with watercolors enough to have no style of my own – I am still attempting to master the brushwork, water, and colors.

Currently, I have just finished Day 11, which is wet-into-wet and some dry brush.  Like in dry-into-wet.  Something like that.  It’s a papaya.

I’m looking forward to 19 more days … sort of a diet!  And to date, no mud!

 

9 / 365 Mucky Corner

9-365-mucky-corner

Between getting used to being back to work after a two week holiday, and multiple visits to the dentist this past week, I’ve been too tired to post.  So, en masse, here come some more corner pictures.  Hopefully, I will get stuff out daily, even though I get to continue my visits to the dentist(s).

With the heavy rains (for us), rain is puddled in the tracks of vehicles and feet of hikers.  Toward sundown, it’s another way to see the sky above in the pools of water.