Beginning Watercolor Homework 10/22/14 : Limiting your palette

In class we looked at some paintings that had been done with just a few colors. Often, a painting done in a limited palette has an austere look (think of Andrew Wyeth), but a thoughtful selection of no more than three colors can produce a range of combinations that can stand in quite well for the diversity of the real world. Sargent, for example, often worked with only ultramarine, yellow ocher and burnt sienna.

At this point, you might ask, "why bother limiting the palette? What do I stand to gain?" The answer is Harmony! Mood!. When all the strokes and washes in a painting are made from the same few components, the result has an overall cohesiveness that is difficult to achieve by other means.

Choose three colors, one red, one yellow and one blue, and use only those three to make a version of the image you brought home, or of one below. You can plan your choices with an eye toward the most accurate interpretation possible, or you can go with your gut feeling about how your components fit together. Some scenes benefit from a palette that keeps the key low, others welcome a noisier selection.

The "limits"  that a limited palette impose on your painting may tempt you to stretch the array of colors just a little. As we saw, ultramarine and burnt sienna can't make a true purple. There's too much yellow in the burnt sienna, which turns the mixture brown. But if you break out and add a little violet to your painting, it will look out of place in the world that's otherwise all made from only three colors. Let the purple be kind of brown, at least for this exercise, to find out what you can really do within the limits.

Intermediate Homework 10/22/14: What color are the darks?

Socks                                                           Mary Whyte

              The colors in the background of Mary Whyte's gorgeous portrait are clearly related to the palette she has established in the figure. As a result, figure and ground are part of the same world. I would not jump to the conclusion, though, that the darks must be a version of the dominant foreground color. There is plenty of blue in the figure, and the artist could have made the background mostly dark blue instead. The resulting image would have had a very different feeling, but the integration of the parts would still have been strong. If she had chosen to make the background neutral black, however, the figure would have been floating in a context that might as well be outer space.
Make  a study of a high contrast image in which you allow the darks to have a noticeable color. Base the color on the palette you have used elsewhere in the picture rather than the photograph. It's up to you. If you have time, try another version, using a different color as the link to the darks.

Photos often make the large dark areas devoid of information, which we accept as reasonable because it's a photo. But that is not what the real scene looked like. If we were there, we would have been able to see all kinds of variation within that area. In a painting, a big chunk of territory with nothing going on, dark or light, usually feels blank and uninteresting. Look again at Mary Whyte's background. It's all dark, and all soft-edged, but there's a lot happening.

Have fun.

Monday Night Homework 10/21/14 : The Important Thing

Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, also wrote a wonderful book called The Important Thing, in which she talks about familiar things, listing their features. Snow, for example, is cold, and it falls from the sky, and tickles your nose when you tilt your head back to watch it, but the important thing about snow is that it is white.
We are doing something similar when we paint. The many features of our subject present themselves, all jostling one another for the spotlight. To know better what needs to be in the picture and what is optional, it helps to decide what the important thing is to you.
Find an image that appeals to you and take time to identify what you want to focus on in the scene. This is not necessarily a "focal point", or a center of interest. It may be a feeling, rather than a particular spot on the page. Keep it in mind when you make decisions about palette, cropping, how the page is oriented, which shapes need to be separated and which combined...everything, in other words.
When we put them up on the wall next week, we can try guessing what the important thing was to you.
Have fun

One painter might see the opportunity to have some fun with patterns in this photo, while another might be more interested in the way the color of the shadows changes as they pass over different surfaces.

Would you want to let the darks in this scene merge into one shape, or would you prefer to point out the differences between them? It depends on what your main purpose is.

10/14/14 Beginning Watercolor Homework: Revealing The Narrative Power of the Darks

Working with watercolor often involves beginning with the lights and progressing toward the darks, which presents the challenge of needing to look past the darks to see what the subject would look like without them. Painting a quick study of the darks alone can help overcome this obstacle.

The bold graphic image of just the darks on a white background is quite memorable. Having isolated the darks once, it will be easier to peel them away from the lights and mid-values in your imagination, so that the first layers of a painting become clear.

You can also use the black/white study to discover the role the final layer plays in providing the narrative content of the scene. If the darks are revealed as the main source of the story the painting tells, you know you can be more casual with the earlier layers.

For homework, look for an image with strong darks and lights, like one of these, below, and then make a small, quick, darks-only study. 

In each of these, it would be necessary to round the mid-values up or down. As a general guideline, if a shape is closer to white than to mid-value, make it white. If it's closer to black than mid-value, make it black. The study will reveal where greater subtlety is needed.

When you have finished the study, please do one of the following:

1)  Dry it thoroughly. Now quickly and loosely, paint the lights and mid-values right over the darks. Be efficient with your brushwork. If you go back and forth with your brush too much the darks will run.

Or...

If you've been having trouble making the first layers carefree, even when you've seen that it's the darks that will provide the definition, the exercise below ensures that your lights and middles will not be overly controlled.

2) On a separate piece of paper, make a study of the lights and middle values with no hard edges. Really. Wet the paper well (not dripping, but shiny), and paint quickly. When you intend to save whites, make the area you leave unpainted extra large, so the paint will not swallow it up as it diffuses.

When the wet on wet study is dry, apply the darks.

10/13/2014 Monday Night and Wednesday Afternoon Homework: Separating Shapes

We have spent some time practicing how to decide which edges in a shape are hard , soft, or both. As a means of separating shapes and creating an illusion of depth this is a skill every realist painter can use. It's not the only one, of course, so let's extend this investigation to include other variables: How do we decide which variables to use to get the major shapes to appear separated by space?

In this painting, by Joyce Hicks, just about every shape has a hard edge, but there is no confusion about where things are in space. Consider, one by one, what she has done with color, value and composition to make it easy to read depth in the scene.

By contrast, Josefia Lemon's landscape comprises almost entirely soft edges, yet she, too, creates a feeling of vast space. Go down the list: Value, color, composition and wetness. What decisions has the artist made to bring about this illusion?
These are deliberate decisions, the result of experience in both the nature of the medium and understanding how we see.

Here's a scene with a real collision of shapes.Some work must be done to simplify the picture and get the shapes to separate. Can any of the shapes be combined to make the space easier to read? Which variables would that involve? What can be done with color to keep the background more distant? How about value? Edges?

How many separate buildings do you see in the background at the end of the street? Could they be combined? How can you keep them separate from the group of buildings in the middle distance, right behind the car? Don't forget color temperature as a spacial tool. As a rule, warms advance and cools retreat.
Make a couple of sketches of one of these photos, or, better yet, find one you'd like to translate into watercolor. Experiment with manipulating variables to separate shapes in space. Keep track of the decisions you made so we can discuss them during critique.
Have fun!

Methow Valley Report

The Methow Valley is surely most beautiful this time of year (though winter comes close). Even after the worst fire season on record the valley seems richer in color and clear air than I've ever seen it. Here's Pearrygin Lake in the late afternoon:

That's what I'm talking about

Painting at the beaver pond at Chickadee trailhead:

The burn site we visited turned out to be the most inspiring painting location of all, partly because of how well it resolved into light, middle and dark layers, but mostly, I believe, because it encouraged a dramatic, emotional interpretation. I'd get all sappy if I start listing the complex feelings we all had there. I'll just say it made better painters of us, at least for a while.

I strongly urge you to get over there before the snow arrives, so you can take the North Cascades highway. I came down from Washington Pass into a vast bowl of moonlight that made it necessary to pull over. 

The local people all have astonishing stories to tell about the fires and flooding - tales of courageous neighbors, resignation and relief, a 25,000 foot cloud of smoke, the return of the green in the forest.

They could use your tourist dollars, right about now. 

These two paintings are for sale to benefit the recovery process. Please write to me at tom@hoffmannwatercolors if you're interested.

Wednesday Morning Homework, 10/8/14 : Layers

If you missed class today you'll need to find an image that resolves nicely into a series of layers. In the studio, we indulged ourselves by selecting images that look really easy. Hey, why not?

Start with a simple outlining of the major shapes, the ones that need to appear separated in order to see the illusion of space. Adjust their positions as needed to correct any unfortunate convergences.

Block in the first layer for all the shapes before moving on to the second, unless the scene requires more than one layer to be applied while the first one is still wet.

Try to tell the whole story in 4 layers, or fewer.