India ink, watercolor, sketchbook. Wildcat Beach is one of the most beautiful beaches along the California coast, and what makes it interesting is not only do you see the ocean, you see the other side of peninsula, more water, and you want to wander along its top, and on the shore, or sail around. There is a lot of mystery here, beauty on a sunny day, strange and eerie in the fog and mist of the summer coast.
Seldom are my watercolors subtle in color. Instead, they tend to be bright and rather garish. Today, I focused on a softer color while painting, meaning more delicate colors, more muted tones. The reason for this is I was driving down to the Valley for an appointment, and I was noticing the soft, hazy qualities of the air. Greens were light and delicate, flowers alongside the roads, while strong, were not a brilliant yellow. In the distance hills and mountains were soft, blurring into the distance – still clear, but very, very soft.
This motivated me to see if I could accomplish something a bit more subtle. I looked at a picture of the northern California coastline, which can be rugged and foggy, with mists rolling in and out, obscuring and revealing at any given time.
Below, is the first painting. I used a lot of water to paint with as well as dilute my colors. This makes them more pale. It seems to have worked fairly well.
To test my theory of a softer, more grey image – longer grey scale – I turned the painting into a black and white image by both desaturating the same image above, as well as removing all vibrancy.
As you can see, there are a few areas which are very dark, but there are a lot of shades of grey, most of which fall into the arena of middle values.
Below is the “revised” version of the first. Here I added some white gouache to the rocks on the lower right, helping define them and to give a sense of breaking water. I cleaned up – removed – the turquoise streak sitting in the middle of the painting. Finally, I mixed some bright yellow and gouache to add dots of color to the lower left of the painting, creating a bit more defined foreground and to break up some of the edges.
I prefer the second version. However, you will note that the values remain the same for the most part below.
To tell the truth, delicate watercolor frighten me! They require a more delicate approach to the paint and water combinations. This was really a good exercise for me and I can see some more follow up paintings along this line. They do not even need to be misty, but just perhaps more pale but still with good contrast.
Where I live, it is quite dry, so those of you who live in more wet and damp climates have more water vapor in your atmosphere than we do. You can see this when you compare watercolorists’ work from other parts of the world, such as Britain or Holland.
One of the things that is often a point of contention for many who work in watercolor is when to stop – when not to paint any more – when is overworking the painting happening. Today’s study is of a lone building on Saturna Island in British Columbia. It sits on a hill, silhouetted against the sky.
The building itself is not well done – it is overworked. That, though, was not the point of the painting. The point of the painting is the hill up to the house – paint it, work the colors, create depth and dimension and a sense of the vegetation. I worked wet-in-wet; put a few glazes on; re-wet the paper and painted again when I needed to add some detail, such as the shape of grasses or vegetation. I also wanted to create a way to get the eye up the hill to the house, and the pathway itself does the trick.
Composition is also something I was considering. How am I leading the eye to that little building? Above is a an overlay with some of my eye-deas. I can think of more, too, but I could also go nuts analyzing things. The darks acted as a balance on either side of the hill, but the tree on the right is too big as far as I am concerned. It just kept growing – spring??
Finally, values. Lights, darks, mediums. Is my contrast working? If I look, I see the zig-zag of the darker path leading up the hill, but more subtle is the light zig-zag to its left. The darker values on the right of the hill repeat the zig-zag. Various areas of light and dark point your eye toward the building.
I am pleased with the hill in this painting, and that is what I wanted to focus on. It is an oddly shaped mass of color, but within it are variations of all sorts – warm and cool, dark and light – that give it shape and depth.
My current focus on watercolor is planes and dimension. I am trying to break down my ability to create structure, and for me the natural shapes of hills and trees are far easier to work on for now, although buildings will come in the future. Negative painting was a first study, but that surrounds as well as creates other planes and dimensions.
Let’s see what is next!
I got a few painterly goodies for Christmas, and one was a new tablet of watercolor paper, one which I have never heard of before. Of course, it needs checking out. How does it handle wet paper and washes? Dry brush? Bleeding? Etc. It is not an expensive paper – $20 for 32 pages of 9×12 pure cotton paper – but it is actually a decent one. I can lift colors from it pretty easily, too! It is a rather nice bit of paper overall, and while not Arches or Fabriano, I think it will do quite well for studies, and probably gouache as well.
Besides playing with new paper, I have also attempted to lead the eye in the composition to a small area of white. Rocks, waves, clouds, land masses, sand, whatever are all designed to catch your eye. I think it worked out pretty good. I also am rather pleased with the movement of the sand in the lower right hand corner.
9×12, CP 140# paper, watercolor.
Today I refilled my gouache palette with colors, and then some more colors. I threw in some retardant, too. And I tried to paint. Gosh, it is amazing how you have to reacquaint yourself with something!
Ink, Yarn & Beer 