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.

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.
   

Watercolour Painting - Using Brushes

The Flat Brush (Hake)

Lets start with the workhorse brush, the large 1 1/2 inch hake.

It is large, holds lots of water and that needs to be controlled.

1. Start by dipping the brush in the water. Then rest the brush on the rags keeping the tip of the materials clear of the cloth.This way the excess water is taken from the body of the brush and the tips stay wet. Never dry the tips unless you are packing up for the day. Repeat every time you rinse your brush so you control the amount of water in your paint mix. This little routine is important and well worth practicing a few times before starting to paint. With a little practice it will become an automatic habit.
2. Using the corner of the brush tip take up some paint and in the centre of the palette, keep the brush flat, and move from left to right. This blends the paint with the water held in the brush. It also takes up the blended paint on the brush ready to apply to the paper.
3. To mix colours together, the method is as in step 2, just repeat the process with a second, or even third, colour and blend with the first. Turning the brush over and repeating the side to side movement gives an even loading of mixed paint.

Mixing colours and getting the right tone takes time and practice. Watercolourists spend more time mixing their colours than they do actually painting.Test mixes and tones on a spare piece of paper adding water, or paint as needed to get the tone or colour you want.

The smaller flat brush (hake) is used in the same way as the larger one.

A final point on hakes - NEVER bend the bristles down on the palette, it is a sure fire way of damaging the brush.

Using a Rigger

1. The no3 rigger is a very small fine brush. it can be held and used like a pen, dipping into water and then paint and mixing on the palette. This is done with the same sideways movement used with a hake. When using a rigger the paint mix should have a similar consistency as ink
2. As it is so small it will come as no great surprise that the rigger does not hold a lot of water so it may take several dips into the water jar. Use plenty of water as it is all to easy to clog the bristles with lumps of paint. A useful check to see if your paint is mixed, if there are solid lumps of paint on the hairs of your rigger then you need to be using more water.
   

Watercolour Painting - Building a Picture

OK this applies to all mediums really, whatever the subject or style the basic formula to begin with is the same. That eliminates that dreaded 'how do I start?' feeling. Looking at those first blank sheets of paper can be quite daunting, still can be for me after years of practice.

So lets start by breaking down a picture into four components.

• Horizon
• sky
• middle ground
• foreground

Always work from horizon to foreground and you won't go far wrong. Its a simple habit to get into and sure makes the painting life much easier.

Watercolour Painting - Getting it Together

So you want to paint, now lets get equipped to produce your first masterpiece. Before you put your Nikes on and dash of to buy out your local art shop you need to have a list of what you need, saves a lot of time and a hell of a lot more money.

Paints

Watercolours come in tubes and pans. Pans are hard little tablets of paint which need to be softened with water, and lightweight and easy to transport about. Tubes are ready to use so less hassle so good to begin with.

There are many different paint manufacturers of both student and artist quality paints. To begin with student quality is cheaper so finding your painting preferences is less of a hard push on your wallet. The easy way to tell the difference is the stars on the tubes. Like hotels the more stars the more you can expect from your paint. So which of the manufacturers is best? Again it is personal preference and well worth varying the brand till you find the one that suits your painting. I work in Dahler Rowney and sometimes even now trial other paints but DR suits me so I come back to it.

So now colours, oh wow there is so many. Keep your palette simple is a golden rule. Choose 8 or 9 paints and work with them. My 9 palette consists of:

• Ultramarine Blue
• Burnt Umber
• Alizarin Crimson
• Cobalt Blue Hue
• Lemon Yellow
• Light Red
• Raw Sienna
• Payne's Grey
• Hooker's Green Dark

Also I carry two tubes of gouache, namely permanent white and flesh tone. Gouache is useful to have in the kit box and I'll explain that in due course.

Two major NOT DOs at this point.

• Don't buy a huge great box of every colour available, you'll never use them.
• Don't buy bargain bucket paint, they don't mix properly even separate on the paper which is frustrating to say the least.

Brushes

Again be minimal, you don't need a roll of a hundred brushes, 3 will do fine and cover everything. So the brush list:

• Large one and half inch hake/flat brush. This is the watercolourists workhorse. Goat hair is preferable but synthetic will do.
• Small three-quarter inch hake/flat brush. Idea for smaller areas. Goat hair is again preferable but synthetic is fine.
• No 3 rigger. This the detail work brush. Fine lines, curves even a signature.

Paper

Always use watercolour paper. So they types of paper available are:

• Hot Pressed Paper - Very smooth surface, ideal for illustrative work.
• Cold Pressed (Not) Paper - a medium grained surface and is the most used and easiest to find.
• Rough Paper - A very rough surface paper.

Paper can be bought as sheets or pads. The pads come in various sizes from postcard size to 20x24 inches. About A3 is the easiest and most convenient size and for starting out a cold pressed paper, minimum 300gsm. Anything less than 300gsm weight will need pre-soaking and stretching and unless you got nothing better to do with your time that's a royal pain in the butt.

Other Kit

• White plate, tray or palette.
• Large jar, pot for water
• Cloths or old rags to wipe brushes
• Pencil, HB is fine
• Ruler
• Putty eraser
• flat board larger than your paper all round.
• Masking Tape
• Masking fluid
• Hair dryer (OK not essential but useful for speeding up drying)
  

Watercolour Painting - Some Basics - Watercolour, a History?

Watercolour has come in and out of fashion many times. The paint is made from natural pigments mixed with a water-soluble gum that acts as a binder. It was believed watercolour painting began in England at the start of the 1700s. Now its known the Egyptians used a form of watercolour, over 3000 years ago, Irish monks used it to illustrate the Book of Kells and other manuscripts between 600-800AD. Oils are considered more durable so watercolour fell out of fashion with artists and became an artist's sketching aid. Those sketches would later possibly become the oil paintings which now sit in the world's galleries. Then in the 1700s watercolour came back into its own when a studio, opened by Dr Thomas Munro, for young aspiring watercolourists releases a William Turner on to the world. Turner's work is legendary the world over and still the inspiration to many watercolourists.

Watercolour Painting - Some Basics - Why Use Watercolour Paints?

Watercolour is said to be the most difficult of all the painting mediums to use, personally I feel the opposite. Watercolour has so many benefits that its just simply the easiest start to painting.

Watercolours are:

• easy to blend and mix
• easy to use and apply
• dry quickly so no hanging around endlessly to start the next bit
• relatively inexpensive to buy enough to get started. All art materials are expensive.
• good value as a little paint goes a long way
• cleaner to use as watercolours wash out of clothing and rags
• non-toxic so safe to use with youngsters about
• easy and lightweight to carry
• can be done anywhere, any time

That is a lot of pluses for watercolour and once you got it sussed as a painting medium it easy to move on to others such as gouache, acrylics and oils.