Watercolour Painting - Painting People

Figures are not difficult to paint if you simplify the shape of a person into something we all recognise and can draw. Using a simple shape like a carrot, painting people into a landscape scene is easy. Paul Cezanne, the famous French impressionist, who first discovered the value of carrots in learning to draw and paint said, ‘The day is coming when a single carrot freshly observed will cause a revolution’.


On a piece of paper practice, with your rigger, drawing the outline shape of a carrot. Now fill it in. Paint a few carrots.


Next put a dot on top of some carrots - not too big, and leaving a small gap to represent the neck. Paint tiny darker carrots on the remaining carrot bodies, and what have we got ? Men and women!


If you spend half an hour painting carrot people you will find they start to grow arms and legs. What’s happening is you are starting to improvise and sketch, and the more you practice the better you will get at painting people.

Drawing Notes - Negative and Positive Spaces

Your ability to draw is greatly enhanced when you know how to identify positive and negative spaces, visually measure distances, and apply the resulting information to your drawings.

This lesson illustrates and demonstrates the process of breaking down subjects into positive and negative spaces, and sketching their shapes within a drawing space. The four parts are:

• Seeing lines between spaces
• Containing spaces in a drawing space
• From seeing spaces to sketching shapes
• Examining the final stages of a drawing.

Contour lines are formed when edges of spaces and/or objects meet. Contour lines can outline a complete object as well as its individual parts.

A contour drawing comprised of lines that follow the contours of the edges of various components of a subject and define the outline of its shapes.

Shapes are the outward contours or outlines of objects. Basic shapes include circles, ovals, squares or rectangles.

Positive space is the space in a drawing that is occupied by an object and/or its various parts.

Negative space refers to the background around and/or behind an object or another space.

Proportion refers to the relationship in size of one component of a drawing to another or others.

A drawing space (also called the drawing surface or a drawing format), refers to the area in which you render a drawing within a specific perimeter.

You can use the overall shape of your subject (and its parts) as a contour drawing in two steps:

1. Study the subject until you can identify the subject’s positive space. Everything else is then considered negative space.
2. Examine the shapes and sizes of the positive and negative spaces and how they fit together to identify the locations of the contour lines.

Drawing Notes - Basic Techniques - Introduction

Most objects that we are likely to want to draw can be visually simplified into three basic shapes: cube, cone and sphere (plus any combination of these shapes).

Training yourself to see these shapes contained within your subjects makes it considerably easier for you to start to draw them, so it is worth practising. In addition, the whole idea of translating three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional surface can become easier by practising shading, looking carefully at where the highlights are on an object and at the corresponding shadows.

Spheres form the basis of many vegetables, such as onions and oranges, as well as vases, ornaments and even fish paraphernalia. The highlight here is usually circular and can normally be seen towards the top, where the natural light is reflected.

Cones can be found in objects such as watering cans, lampshades and party hats. Always look for the long, thin reflective highlight that is found on a curved surface.

The cube is the basis for objects as diverse as matchboxes, radios and garden sheds - only the scale differs. Unlike the two curved objects, a cube has clearly defined shading, usually light on top, medium tone on one side and a darker tone on the other visible side.

It really is a case of starting to view your subjects as part of a wider scene. You are unlikely to ever ‘see’ a bedside lamp as a cone balanced on top of a sphere - but if you can imagine how the lamp may look if it was constructed in such a way, then you will certainly find that this helps your drawing - especially in the early stages.

Studying light is also a valuable activity. Whilst writers and philosophers spend much time simply thinking, so artists spend much time just looking. The key is to mentally absorb what you see and be prepared to apply this to situations where you have to rely on your visual memory due to lack of appropriate lighting.

Finally, once you have mastered the skill of visualizing everyday objects as being constructed from individual spheres, cones and cubes, start to seek combinations to develop your own personal ‘toolbox’.

From Cone to Flowerpot

A cone can become the base shape for many objects, in this case, a flowerpot. Try to ensure that there are no points on the base: a smooth, unbroken line should curve round at the places where the straight lines meet in.

Next, start to construct the shape of the object that you wish to develop into a drawing around the base shape.

The base shape has now served its purpose and can be removed, leaving the ‘moulded’ shape of the flowerpot looking three-dimensional and thoroughly convincing.

Watercolour Painting - Mountain Landscape

Our first painting only uses one tube of paint so we don’t have to worry about mixing colours. We learn about tone too – mixing in more or less water to create lighter or darker shades of colour. Read the steps through before you start.

You will need:

• Paint: Burnt Umber
• Brushes: Large (1 ½ inch) brush and no.3 rigger.
• Paper: a sheet of 10 x 14 inch 140lb/300gsm watercolour paper.
• Palette
• Water pot
• Mop-up cloths
• Pencil
• Ruler
• Eraser
• Board 16 x 20 inch to stick your paper on
• Masking tape
  

1. Horizon – Using masking tape across the corners, fix your sheet of paper lengthways to the board. (This is called ‘landscape’. If the paper was upright it would be called ‘portrait’.) With a pencil, draw the horizon line about 3 inches up from the paper’s bottom edge. Prop up the board or place on your easel. Be aware that you only have two minutes to paint a sky, once you’ve wet the paper, so don’t labour it! Squeeze out some Burnt Umber onto your palette.

2. Sky – Wet the large brush. Starting from the top of the page, use broad strokes to wet down to an inch above the horizon line. (Look from the side to see the sheen and make sure it is wet.)

3. Quickly mix watery Burnt Umber. Paint the sky starting from the top. Leave some gaps of white cloud. Mix more paint with less water to apply another darker layer of sky. Use horizontal dabs to form sausage shapes – large ones at the top, small below. Dry this.

4. Middleground – Reload your brush with paint. Keep above the horizon line and paint a wobbly ‘M’ for your mountains. Fill this in and let it dry. (I’m left handed so I start from the right. If it is easier, start from the left.)

5. Mix some darker paint (use less water). Dab in the lake shore, holding the brush upright like a chisel. Leave some white bits but don’t go below the horizon line. Dab some even darker paint along the horizon line to finish the lake edge.

6. Foreground – Making sure your painting is dry, let’s paint the lake. Make a weak mixture of paint (use lots of water) and load the large brush well. Start from one side and make a broad stroke across to the other side. Leave some white between the shore and water’s edge. Sweep across again, and repeat the action to fill the foreground with water.

7. When the lake is dry you can paint the rushes. Dry your large brush on your cloth, and then load it with almost neat paint. Using short downward strokes, form small patches of rushes. You can vary the shade of the paint slightly by adding a little water to give lighter patches here and there, but keep the brush quite dry so that the bristles splay to create the stalks of the rushes.

8. To finish off, paint in one, three or five little birds (even numbers never work right on the eye for some reason) with the rigger brush - it’s simple, just a tiny ‘V’ stroke or tick to show the wings in flight. Then sign your painting off (personally I use a pencil but a pen or paint is fine too).

Congratulations! You’ve just created your first masterpiece.

Drawing Notes - Materials - Watercolour

Although watercolour is a medium more usually associated with painting, it can easily be used in a way that allows it to fit into the category of drawing. The key difference is that for drawing purposes, watercolour is used primarily to compliment linear illustrations, rather than using its pure colour to create an image.

To draw with watercolour paints you will need a couple of soft watercolour brushes (usually sable or squirrel hair) and a suitable watercolour paper that needs to be strong and preferably slightly textured, cartridge paper is perfectly acceptable, however.

Try It Yourself

Using only a paint brush and two colours – one light and one dark – draw a yellow tennis ball without the use of outlines.


Step by Step Exercise

1. After creating the shapes by line drawing with a B pencil, wash the basic colours onto them.
2. Next, mix a neutral yet warm grey from ultramarine, violet and a touch of orange, and use this to wash around the shapes of the shadows, creating a sense of curvature on all three objects.
3. The final drawing relies heavily on the effects of colour, while still emphasizing the individual shapes and the linear structure of the detail.
   

Drawing Notes - Materials - Pen and Ink

You can draw with any type of pen you choose – a ballpoint or fountain pen can be used effectively – but there are two types that are particularly well suited to drawing for the following reasons.

Most ‘fineline’ or permanent ink pens are designed for artists, and produce sharp, fine lines that do not run or bleed, no matter what you do with them. Using these pens can produce fine line drawings that require no more treatment; alternatively you can dilute some Indian ink and add tone to a line drawing by washing this onto your picture using a soft brush.

The other type is the fibre-tip pen (often used for writing). The ink in these pens often is not permanent, which gives you the opportunity to wash across a line drawing with plain water to create subtle bleeds and tones.

Try It Yourself

Draw a pair of bananas using a fibre-tip pen, recording all the shapes in line. Then use a wet, soft brush to create the shading, starting at the bottom and working up towards the light.


Step by Step Exercise

1. Record the curved shapes of the group of objects using waterproof ink.
2. Using a very dilute ink, select the darkest areas of the group and wash this on, starting at the bottom and pulling up towards the light areas.
3. The key to this tonal drawing is not so much the variety of tones achieved by subtle dilution of the ink, but more the highlights that were left alone. You always need highlights in any drawing, and if they can reflect the texture of your objects, so much the better.
   

Drawing Notes - Materials - Watersoluble Pencils

Water-soluble pencils are remarkably versatile, as they can not only be used as normal pencils for either line drawing or shading, but they can also be washed across with a wet, soft brush to create a watercolour effect.

Water-soluble coloured pencils contain solid sticks of coloured pigment that can be dissolved with water, making them valuable, multipurpose drawing tools.

Water-soluble graphite pencils work to the same principle, except when washed across they produce tones of grey instead of colour. Both types of pencils have great potential and are certainly worth experimenting with.

Try It Yourself

Take an orange and two water-soluble coloured pencils – orange and purple. Draw the outline of the fruit with the orange and block in the colour using the edge. Lightly shade the base with purple and wash over the colour, working from the light top to the darker base.


Step by Step Exercise

1. First block in the shapes with appropriate colours; don’t worry too much about tone at this stage.
2. Next, choose a warm colour such as purple or violet to draw on to the previous stage to create the shadows and darker tones. Then wash across the shapes with a wet brush.
3. The final stage illustrates the characteristics of water-soluble pencils – bright, strong colours and a fluid watercolour feel, yet with the solidity of a pencil drawing.