This first project is concerned with learning basic techniques with watercolour
Exercise: Loading the brush
Wednesday 29 August 2012
For this exercise, I chose the following materials
– A3 watercolour paper, 220 and 250 g
– Cotman Watercolours (Winsor & Newton) Box with 12 half pans
– Round brushes, sizes 6 and 10
Colour chart: observations
– Decision to first make a colour chart with the colours I have, before doing the exercise. Idea: Get to know my colours
– There is no black in the colour selection! I wonder whether I’ll be ok without or should add black. Black is not among the suggested colours in the course materials
– My box contains a nice selection of colours. There are two different tones of the base colours (blue, red, yellow, green), plus two brown tones, plus chinese white
– I wonder whether I will ever need the white colour. Is it intended to correct errors by overpainting them with white? Or maybe for setting highlights onto a finished painting?
What have I learnt?
– Impossible to make tiny dots when the brush is loaded with paint. The brush must be dried first, loaded with few paint.
– Tiny patches are best made when there’s only very few paint on the brush
– With intermediate amounts of paint, small and larger patches can be made
– If there’s too much paint on the paper, this can be soaked up with a dry brush.
Conclusion: The amount of paint on the brush has to be adapted to what one wants to paint. This might be difficult when one is in a flow, but hopefully gets easier with practice.
Mark making
I used the remainder of the colour I prepared for the brush loading exercise to try out some mark making on an A3 sheet of watercolour paper. I really like the transparency effect of painting layers on top of the other!
Exercise: Fading tones
Friday 31 August 2012
The task was to make marks on a sheet of watercolour paper which fade out from a high intensity to a low intensity tone. I worked two evenings on this exercise, and I think I could spend much more time. It’s really interesting to look at the transparency effects resulting from applying layers of watercolour.
I painted two sheets, the first one in brown (burnt umber) and the second in green (sap green).
When the paint dries, tones seem to get a little lighter, so the transparency effects can be better assessed after drying. As the brush got dryer while I was making marks with the loaded paint, the marks got fainter. For smooth gradations of marks it makes a difference where one makes the beginning mark with a freshly loaded brush – the beginning marks tend to be much more intense in colour.
I also noticed some minor progress controlling the fade, but this needs much more practice. It’s about how much water to add to the colour, when to add it, how much paint to add to the colour in the first place. Adding new water, for example when the reservoir of paint is drying out, is always risky because one typically is not able to mix the exact tone again. For more control, it would then be better to prepare enough paint before starting.
I also noticed that the effect of adding more water depends on the amount of paint which is there and the pigment concentration. For example, I started with not much paint in high concentration, and adding some drops of water had a strong dilutive effect. But with a more diluted paint, more and more water must be added to make the tone visibly lighter.
And then there’s a sort of natural fainting of the tone from the beginning to the ending marks with a loaded brush. With highly concentrated colour, the marks quickly became “broken” and let the paper shine through. With more diluted paint, this happened much later.
More tonal variation can be achieved by layering watercolour marks. The layers increase the intensity of colours, both for those marks that are already intensely coloured and for those which are only faint.
Exercise: Random marks
Saturday, 1 September 2012
The task was to load the brush heavily with watercolour and then make random marks by flicking across the sheet, first with one colour and after everything had dried, with a second colour on top. Again after drying, the final step was to apply a faint but even wash of a third colour, using a large brush.
I chose Viridian green for the first, Phtalo blue for the second random marks layer, and Alizarin Crimson red for the washed layer.
I noticed that making the random marks in a single go resulted in erratic shapes of marks with quite even colour intensity and occasional dry-brush effects. Transparency effects resulted mainly from applying the second and third colour, with changes in tone where colour areas overlapped. Applying the red layer over the blue and green marks dampened the overall colourfulness by taking away the white paper background and changing the hues. But this effect was certainly due to my choice of colour. I imagine that a yellow layer might even have intensified the colours, although it would still have reduced contrasts by taking away the white.
Second sheet: experimentation
I made a second sheet repeating the earlier ‘fading tones’ exercise, but this time with the three colours I had used for the ‘random marks’ exercise. I wanted to try out the effect of applying transparent layers in varying colour intensities. I like the result, the fading marks create a kind of dynamic movement or depth in the painting. The transparency effect become more and more beautiful with every layer applied. Maybe it’s an art to know when to stop, leaving enough white background to maintain the light and colourful overall impression of a painting.
Exercise: Fish and Leaves
The first task was to paint stylized blue fish on one half and stylized green leaves on the other half of an A3 sheet. The second task was to choose either fish or leaves and paint the stylized forms over an entire A3 sheet. After drying, the sheet should be put under the tap to wash out the colour. After drying again, one half of the sheet was to be covered with a layer of a faint second colour. That dried, some more of the chosen stylized shape should be painted over the entire sheet.
I found my stylized leaf form less successful than the fish, but I chose the leaves for the second task because I thought it might be interesting to explore how layers of leaves would look like. I thought about having a blue sky background and therefore painted the layer of the second colour on the upper half of the sheet, rather than separating the sheet vertically as in the course example.
Considering the results
Did accidental effects help you in any way at any stage?
Yes, I think the exact shapes of my fish and leaves are accidental effects, and also the different intensities of colour. This created a nice dynamic effect in the shapes, because no two were alike, and also their distances varied randomly.
How would you describe the effects of washing off?
Washing off lets the colour become more faint. I can imagine that this would be like a distance effect in a painting.
What did the wash layer add to your picture?
Having done the layer to cover the upper half of the sheet, it somehow created structure and depth, like a horizon above which the blue sky extends. It also added more variety in tonal shadings, because it mixed with the green leaves. The blue layer also dampened luminosity of that area of the painting.