This project is about laying washes, i.e. applying layers of paint rather than painting pictorial details.

What to learn
–    how to work with wet and dry paper
–    how the colour dries
–    how much paint to load the brush with

Exercise: Plain washes

The task was to create a uniform wash on an A3 sheet of watercolour paper, using a large soft brush loaded with plenty of paint. I chose a dark brown colour, burnt umber, and tried to mix a medium intense tone. The wash worked quite well although it was lighter than I expected. It also takes some time to get a feeling for the amount of paint needed to cover a larger area.

The second part of this exercise was to paint a simple shape after the sheet has dried, and during the waiting time I proceeded to the next exercise.

I painted a clay pitcher as a simple shape. It’s original colour is a deep blue, but somehow I felt more like trying out a different colour and mixed a violet tone from Alizarin Crimson and one of the blue tones, unfortunately I did not make a note and I’m not sure whether it was Ultramarine or Phtalo blue.

Assessing the pictorial possibilities of a shape on a coloured ground

Painting this shape was more or less my first experience with using watercolour to paint an object, and I like it. It felt very natural to create deeper tones by layering the colour, for example with the pitcher handle. Other parts of the shape were less successful, this was where the additional layer bleeded into the existing colour, as on the left area of the shape. Probably with practice one gets more feeling for how long to wait until a new layer can be applied.

Painting the shape over the coloured ground seems to create an inner connection between background and form  through the subtle mixing of tones. Had I spared out the shape, the two elements of the painting would look much less connected and the colour contrast would be stronger. So I think this technique is a way of creating cohesion between the elements of a painting.

On the other hand, the technique is not always applicable, for example when the colours of the background are too dark for overpainting, or when the background is in mixed colours and this mix would disturb the colour impression of the object if it was drawn over the background.

 

Exercise: Tonally graded washes

The task was to create a wash on an A3 sheet of paper which gradually fades from top to bottom, by adding more water each time the brush needs loading. I stayed with the burnt umber from the previous exercise to use up the paint I had already mixed, but added some more pigment to have a more intense tone to begin with.

Creating the fading tone was quite difficult and I wasn’t satisfied with the first one because the colour stayed too dark rather than fade away. I made a second sheet on different paper but this time the fading set in too early and too abrupt so that the result was no gradual wash but more of a two-colour wash separated in the upper third of the sheet.

So I understand that this tasks is quite complicated and will need some more practice.

  

 

Exercise: Mixed-colour washes

The task was to create washes from two colours and a third by mixing these together. Each colour should occupy about 1/3 of the sheet. Then the exercise should be repeated, using a sponge instead of a brush.

I chose Phtalo Blue and Burnt Umber for this exercise, because I wasn’t very interested in mixing primary colours like red, blue or yellow. I thought mixing the blue and the brown might look a bit landscape-like, if I used blue (representing sky) on the top and brown (representing earth) on the bottom of the sheet. The mix of these colours became a muddy green which I found very natural, too.

For the first wash, I chose a portrait orientation because I thought this would give me a larger area to blend colours. For the second wash with the sponge I chose the landscape format.

  

 

Considering the results

I found the plain wash sheet very successful because it is really even and very subtle in its tone. By contrast, the tonally graded washes were much more difficult to do and I think my first attempts weren’t very successful. If I was to paint them as the background, I think I would build them up with more than one layer to achieve a satisfying gradation in tone.

The two mixed-colour washes are technically not very fine or subtle, but I find them nevertheless quite successful because I like the colours and the unexpected variety of tones resulting from my attempts to blend them subtly. I could imagine both of the sheets as interesting backgrounds for a watercolour painting.

I very much enjoyed working with a sponge. I used a natural sponge with a very pronounced texture. I used it with horizontal movements and this created a subtle stripe effect of changing tones which looks very interesting.

For the future, I think I would need some more technical practice with creating tonally graded washes in a single colour to learn how to achieve a satisfying gradation from dark to light tone. For the mixed-colour washes technical practice would certainly be beneficial too, but here chance effect have a lot of charm despite technical imperfections.

One thing to be careful about is the paper. It looks as though I worked to much on the first mixed-colour wash and caused some paper fibres to dissolve. This is less beautiful and I think especially as a beginner I will often feel that I need to work over areas to improve them. Choosing paper which resists some work would be more comfortable then.