I started this task based on the two landscape sketches I made recently while in Crestwood, a little town close to New York. It is a view over a water basin of the Bronx river which I painted while sitting on a huge fallen tree. A large branch of the tree formed an arc over the water, and there was a complex visual pattern of dark branches and their reflexions on the water.

On the spot I first made a watercolour sketch of the scene (A4) and then a pencil drawing of the tree in my brown square sketchbook (21 x 22 cm), and also took some pictures for later reference. I chose one of them for this exercise on coloured grounds.

  

I started with another watercolour sketch on white paper and then made a tonal study in grey pastels to help me sorting out colours, the lighter and darker tones and also the various textured areas.

    

Then I made two paintings on coloured ground. The first was on green, the second on light brown wash in the same A4 watercolour sketchbook. I employed some white gouache for the lightest areas and switched to a flat brush for the trees in the second painting.

     

While painting, I had some trouble with my choice of subject, because I found it too loaded with details and lacking an open view. I found it difficult to paint smaller elements or the narrow, lengthy shapes of reflecting areas on the water. These areas are not very recognizable in the paintings. I think the depiction of foliage, reflection, tree in the foreground become better over the paintings of the series. If I were to do it again, I think I’d choose a more open view and reduce the amount of details included in the painting.

Guided reflections

Which is the most successful landscape study and why?

I think the final one is the most successful, because this is where I achieved a more skillful depiction of the elements in the view, and also because the background colour (brown) blends into the painting without looking strange.

Is the atmoshpere different in any of the pictures? If so, say why you think this is.

Yes, I think the painting on the green paper has a bit of twilight appeal, while the final (on brown) looks bit sad. The most friendly atmosphere is probably in the paintings on white ground, because the colours look brightest.

What problems did the tinted papers present?

The tinted papers changed the colour hues and toned down the entire scene. One of the challenges was to brighten this up a bit and not produce a very dark painting, or an effect of all mudded colours. I think the painting on green paper looks quite artificial, probably because of the blueish green I used. The brown paper blended more naturally with the colours I added on top.

Were there ways in which the tinted papers helped you to find your landscape colours more easily?

Maybe I did not choose the best subject for this exercise, because my landscape was so dominated by green tones and there were not many other colours. I don’t think the tinted colours were particularly helpful for my colour choices.

How important to your paintings were the gouache and/or oil pastels?

I used less gouache than in the earlier two subjects (shoes and still life), and no oil pastels. I found my background colours relatively light so less need to brighten up larger areas with gouache. Maybe I could have included more light in the foliage of the trees on the opposite side of the water basin. It did not occur to me to use oil pastels here. Maybe they’d have worked for the non-reflective areas on the water surface.

Can you see how you might exploit some of these approaches in the future?

I did not feel very comfortable with the tinted grounds nor with the additional media. Difficulties with watercolour medium and the composition were too dominant. If I were to do it again, I’d prefer working on a larger scale and I’d choose a different composition with a more open view.

My aim for this course was to learn painting with watercolours and currently I don’t feel that my skills are very good. I feel I’d still have to do simple paintings to become better with the medium, before switching to experimental stuff. I enjoy experimenting but at this point I feel it’s a distraction from what I set out to learn. Maybe for me it would be better to take some time off and simply paint with watercolours, then come back to the experimental approaches. As this is not possible time-wise, I’ll see where this gets me. Currently my attempts with tinted papers and other media feel a bit half-hearted.

I got back to my two onions and combined them with a spice mug and a pitcher, placed this on a black table and used a yellow towel for the background. Then I made a drawing in the sketchbook to test the composition and look at the tonal values. I wasn’t overly happy with the arrangement but thought it would work for the task.

The paintings did not turn out very well. I found the instructions confusing in that they did not make clear what the focus of the task was – colour temperature, tonal values, or combining drawing media with watercolours. Correspondingly, making the two paintings felt like muddling around without knowing on what to concentrate. I used Scarlet Red for the warm colour ground, and Indigo blue for the cold colour ground.

The main difficulty I had was that painting on these grounds felt like “fighting against” the background colour, rather than working with it. The scarlet red went totally Kitsch when I applied white gouache for the highligts. In the remaining time, I tried to “cool down” the overall effect of the intense red background. I added white to the background to prepare the yellow overlayer, which became a psychedelic orange tone in stark contrast to the blue-violet of the pitcher. By contrast, the Indigo in the second painting caused all colours I subsequently applied to look very weird and unhealthy, and I remember that I tried to “warm it all up”. The colours of the spice mug are quite good though.

    

I’m not satisfied with my watercolour technique in these two paintings. It felt like a step back into fiddling with detail and not applying enough water, so there’s no flow in the colours. I used coloured pencil in the first one to intensify the blue of the pitcher. In the actual painting the pitcher has a stronger violet tone, not the blue of the photo.

In the second one, I used yellow oil pastel to intensify the background colour.

Overall, I did not particularly like the effect of these coloured grounds. It may be due to the particular colours I chose, maybe they were too dominant. The background colours in the previous exercise worked much better for me.

There is indeed a difference in colour temperature of both paintings, the first has a much warmer overall effect than the second. But I wasn’t able to use this effect to bring elements to the fore or send them to the back. Maybe this has to do with the still life subject because the viewer knows that all elements are approximately at the same distance, so the distance effect of colour temperature does not work. I don’t think the cool versus the warm background convey a different sense of distance here. The distance effect might work better with landscape subjects.

I’m not sure what I’m going to make of this experiment. I don’t particularly like the outcome and feel that I have still so many basic things to learn with watercolour that coloured grounds are not something I would want to include in any painting for now. I do see some potential in creating interesting effects from layering and using opaque light colours over dark tones, like the yellow-orange background in the first painting. But maybe I’ll change my mind. It’s been very often that I did not like something right after completing it, but a few weeks later I was better able to see what might be interesting or valuable in it.

 

 

Tonal sketches: Searching for a subject

       

In 23 x 30 cm mixed media sketchbook:
– my two work lamps (black fineliner)
– plants at the kitchen window (gray pastels)
– the blue shoes (coloured pastels)

The blue shoes on coloured grounds

I decided on the shoes because they seemed to work as a subject for this exercise.

  

23 x 30 mixed media sketchbook
– line drawing of the shoes (pencil)
– watercolour sketch on white ground to study tonal relationships

   

A4 watercolour sketchbook
– on purple ground, light source to the right
– on blue ground, light source to the left

Large study on A3 watercolour paper, on orange (burnt sienna) ground

Reflections on my learning

I had been quite skeptical about the idea of using watercolours on coloured grounds. I thought that watercolours need the white paper shining through which gives brightness to all colours. I thought that starting from a medium toned ground, paintings would become quite dark and dull.

But using opaque white paint helped to exploit the full tonal range. The coloured ground changes the colours quite unexpectedly and I found the overall effect quite dramatic. I got along well with the instructions of adding the very obvious dark areas before working on the in-between tones. Compared to the standard rule of working from light to dark, using dark tones early on was more intuitive for me.

The white was not opaque in the two sketchbook paintings, so their purple and blue backgrounds are quite visible. I applied the gouache more thickly in the larger painting, but still there’s an undertone which gives an interesting texture to the whitish background. The background tone holds the painting together, similar to the coloured washes we experimented with in earlier parts of the course.

I was a bit unsure how much to leave of the background colour as medium tone in the painting. I saw the options of adding only lighter and darker tones, versus locating it lighter or darker than the medium tone and adding other tones accordingly. The purple study appears almost monochrome, with the greens resulting in gray to black colours, and no other colour except white for lightening up some areas. The second study became more colourful overall, as I applied a warm brown tone over the blue ground. The blue still shines through in the wardrobe. The third study on burnt sienna ground is quite monochrome again, but in a much warmer tone overall. These effects are all quite unexpected and I guess it takes some practice to make the best use of them.

I’m still a bit skeptical about the technique of using opaque paint with watercolours, because painting like this feels closer to traditional painting with opaque media. It felt more natural, compared to the difficulties I have with using watercolours and working with transparency, but it also felt like avoiding the essence of watercolour painting.

So yes, it definitely expands my possible range of techniques, but I think I still need more skills in “traditional” application of watercolours. Strangely enough, I consider the shoes paintings among the best I’ve made for this course so far. Maybe that was because I was “allowed” to paint the dark elements relatively early, instead of having to work “from light to dark” which is very counter-intuitive for me. Maybe I should depart from that guideline for watercolours on white grounds as well.

As for the subject, yes I think the shoes were appropriate for the exercise, but I had some trouble keeping up interest. Finding a subject was hard. I would have preferred a still life arrangement with fruits or vegetables, but found that too difficult. I also considered an interior view but didn’t find one I liked for this exercise. The shoes worked well because I could arrange the light source in a consistent manner over several days where I worked on the exercise. The shapes were well defined and there were strong shadows. The problem was my feeling of “this is an irrelevant subject which I’m doing only to fulfil the task requirements”. It’s a recurring problem and I hope to gradually get better at finding more interesting subjects. So yes, it was technically appropriate, but  personally not sufficiently engaging.

The onions

While working on the shoes, I considered these two red onions as an alternative subject for studies on coloured grounds. I made an initial watercolour sketch, then a drawing to study the details more closely, and another watercolour sketch.

Although there were interesting tonal fields in the arrangements, I found the onions too complicated for now. I liked the monochrome red-brown tones of the arrangement but thought something more colourful would work better.

On the one hand, I think the watercolour sketches are weak because they are not very accurate in the details, but on the other, I like how they are painted and there’s some charm in the looseness of application. The second one is slightly overworked in the shadows, but works better in the onions’ details.

I also like the pencil drawing and that I used smudging to create soft tones, which is a new technique for me.

It’s all very imperfect but I appreciate the tiny steps of progress I make in handling watercolours and also in drawing skills. Maybe I get back to the onions with a later exercise on coloured grounds.

Fallen tree and other sketches

I recently started a new sketchbook to take with me every day. It’s a small square format of 21 x 22 cm in brown rough paper. I chose this book because the brown paper helps me to tackle one of my weaknesses, which is making marks that are too faint, resulting in drawings that have only a very limited tonal range. The dark paper makes that problem even more visible and  pushes me to make darker marks with more contrasts. I observed the effect in the sketchbook I use for printmaking, so I thought it would be a good idea to keep at it with the watercolour course as well.

 

Brown square 21 x 22 cm sketchbook
– At the bus stop (black biro): I started looking from the outside, with the bus front and the bus stop signpost, then continued inside the bus with the view out of the window and the man sitting opposite me. The contrasts are still too faint, but I like the combination of different views in a single drawing. I realised from the tonal grounds exercise that I can add lighter colours here as well to broaden the tonal range.
– Large tree, bushes and a rock in central park (black fineliner and coloured pencils): I used the opaque white pencil to lighten up the rock. The black fineliner did not work well for making larger areas of deep black tone. I still have difficulties drawing greenery.

  

Sketches made during an excursion to Crestwood, NY
– A4 watercolour sketchbook: A view on a water basin of the Bronx river, sitting on a fallen tree. The tree’s branches stretch out and divide the view.
– Square brown sketchbook: The fallen tree only, using Jet Black pencil. Some improvements in mark making, still needs more contrast.

I took several photos of the location and might get back to that subject later on.

A4 pencil sketch: View from the end of the Railroad Trail in Tarrytown, NY. I’m finding landscapes very difficult to draw. This is another subject I might take up again later and use the photos I made on location as additional sources.