October 28 Make it easy on yourself

 Here are a few landscapes in which your main job is to invent a top or a bottom. That, and making them beautiful, of course.

The beautiful part comes mostly from not correcting or overpainting. This is an opportunity to see if it really is better to leave the paint alone once it's been applied.  An invented landscape can't be wrong , after all,, unless you insist  it is by trying to improve it. If you leave it alone you send out the message that this is the way it's supposed to be.

Invented corn field

If the color in your invented top or bottom is saturated, try and put enough pigment in the puddle to make it satisfying on the first try. Stay out of the water bucket unless your plan requires that you wash your brush.

You can use these images and try switching tops and bottoms, or make them up entirely. Have fun!

The Winter term Zoom-based class is full now. There are a couple of spots left in the in person class and the abstraction workshop. Send me an e-mail if you would like more information.

Tom

October 23, 2021 What Looks Tricky?

Whenever you come face to face with a new subject it helps to ask yourself "What looks tricky?" Then you can design a study that reveals a simple solution to the puzzles that remain unanswered. In the night scene, below, for example, you may find yourself  entangled in the direct presentation of the streetlights. If so, it would be a good idea to experiment until you find a sequence of layers that approximate the brightness of the lamps and the impact they have on their surroundings. 

I see half a dozen bright streetlights we are looking at directly, and as many buildings that are lit indirectly by the lamps. Some of the buildings are darker than the sky and some are lighter. Just to complicate things, some of the buildings are both lighter and darker than the sky. By comparing things to a single shape , the sky, in this case, we gain a basis for understanding how dark the other shapes are.

The lamps are obviously lighter than the buildings. They have soft edges, and a ring of pale color that radiates out from a white center. One of those glowing rings is cool, the others are all very warm. These  sources of light might be a good feature to practice. Would it work to make the edges hard? It would certainly make it easier when the sky closes in on the halo of color. Try it and see. You wouldn't need to paint the whole scene to find out, just a scrap of paper would show you the answer.

Then what? What if you look at the buildings on each side as single shapes rather than as a collection of numerous entities? Think of the overall composition as a big bow tie made up of 4 triangles; the sky is a triangle. The street is another, and the groups of buildings are the other two. 

When you have experimented enough to put all your pieces together use this image, or one of the other night scenes from Oaxaca for your homework. If you don't see the bow tie send me an e-mail.

October Fifteenth Finding an Easy Way

  For many realist watercolor painters the primary job is to discover how to simplify the scene or image they want to paint. The real world doesn't always resolve into a neat sequence of layers that can be laid simply on top of one another. In the photo below, for example, a scattering of very light blades of grass sits among an array of darker ones. 

To paint this subject accurately it seems that one would have to paint around the light grasses to avoid making them appear farther away than the middle value and dark strokes. This is a good example of the branch of watercolor painting known as "No Fun".  Surely there's a way to suggest the mixture of values without resorting completely to negative painting. Fortunately, we are not obliged to be accurate in our interpretation of the subject. Maybe just a few of the separate light grass blades would be enough. 

OK? Refining the image down to the smallest number of essential units sounds good. It still remains for you to discover how you would apply the paint to read as grass? Do you have answers to the following questions?

(1) Is there a way to paint the grass with an overall wash that can underlie everything that will come later?

(2) Is there anything that should be reserved?

(3) Is there anything that should be done while the shape is still wet? 

If so, carry on. If not, get out a piece of practice paper! You could try scraping out a few pieces of grass, just a few. Or maybe you could lift a couple of lights. You could also try masking fluid, once the paper is dry. And there's always opaque paint. Finally, you can usually make it easier by redesigning the look of the image. For example, what if you  make all the grass you invent darker than the previous layer. True, it  would look different, but it might look good.

For homework, experiment with these techniques. Try combining them. Try making an all soft edged version. Maybe all hard edged. Use one of the wetland scenes, and remember, err on the side of too little information.

What Isn't Neutral ? 10/7/21

                                                                      Joseph Zbukvich

What isn't neutral in this interpretation of fishing boats? Maybe the blue stripe on the boat, bottom left,. Or is that only colorful compared to all the greys and browns that are so subtly represented? The sail in the center seems downright yellow until you look at it by itself. Certainly yellow is the dominant color, but it's more like a mud puddle than it is like a lemon.

Note how subtly  the two distant hills display warm reddish brown in the nearer hill and blue-grey in the one that is farther away. Zbukvich understands how little color is required to show us what we actually see.

Most of what we see in the country and plenty of what we see in town is neutral. Let's try putting color back into these desaturated images. Just a little.

                  

                                        

                                                                 Zbukvich

Zbukvich

From Many Shapes, One Shape October 1, 2021

Take a look ate this image. The big, complex shapes would benefit from some simplification. If you painted the whole big shape a mix of the cool blue, the warm red and the warm grass  the result would be a neutral. Don't forget to save the lights. While the overall neutral is still wet touch in the component colors of your simplified shape.Add in the strong darks. Voila!

Here are a couple more images that can be made easier to paint

by simplifying them. Instead of looking for the differences between the shapes, look for the similarities.

 E Plurubus Unum