leemuirhaman

June 3, 2020June 3, 2020

No Light Without Shadow!

All painters want to know how to portray light in order to create atmospheric and dramatic effects. When an artist can emphasize light, an everyday scene can become far more exciting. Since light is represented in watercolor by the untouched paper, the light is already in the painting. The watercolor artist must preserve the white/light while painting mid-tones and shadows in order to accentuate the light. Only by painting the darks or shadows that surround the light can the light be made obvious.

On a bright sunny day, very pale washes (or untouched white paper) suggest direct sunlight, for instance, while darker mixes of color indicate a more shadowed area. Be bold! Without darks, your lights will lack liveliness. Take a look at Paint Your Shadows Bold…And Transparent!, https://leemuirhaman.com/2019/01/29/dont-be-afraid-to-paint-your-shadows-dark/, my blog post from January 29, 2019, for more tips on painting shadows.

Value contrast (with lights close to and emphasized by darks) can create the illusion of light, depth, and a center of interest. On the other hand, if there are too many areas of equal light intensity (or a lack of shadows) in a painting, the image will tend to look flat, less interesting, or bland. If you tend to avoid painting dark colors, perhaps by adjusting your values you could create a picture with more impact.

In many ways, almost nothing is as important in a watercolor painting as how you handle lights and darks (value). (For more in depth information on value, read Why Should I Bother To Use A Gray Scale?, a blog post from May 21, 2019, https://leemuirhaman.com/2019/05/21/why-should-i-bother-to-use-a-gray-scale/.) Protecting the light areas is crucial, so try to plan what areas of the picture you want to save as light before the painting begins. While you can mask, scrape, scrub, or use opaque white gouache to save/regain the white of the paper, it is often much more successful to preserve the variations in light from the outset with a painting plan of attack.

By seeing light and learning to capture it with paint, we can create the dramatic illusion of light in our work. But as Jean Haines says on page 43 in Colour And Light In Watercolour, “Before we can even begin to paint light, we have to be able to see it. Once you start to look for light it becomes an addiction. No painting feels right without it. It becomes a part of your being as an artist. You find yourself searching for ways to bring light into your work, and even more ways to paint it.” So, think about where light plays a part in each of your paintings, and observe what it is about the light on your subject that grabs your attention.

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May 20, 2020

Distinguishing Layers In Watercolor.

Most watercolors are painted in layers; not all in one go. But how do you decide how many layers you need to paint? How do you break down or separate the layers ? How many layers will you need to ‘tell the story’ of your painting? How can you add ‘enough’ layers to suggest shape and detail without losing the light and luminosity you strive for? How many layers are too many?

Seeing in layers.

While there is probably an infinite number of layers possible, the great artists of the past generally show only the essential aspects of a subject with nothing extra added. Their art is deceptively simple. Many of John Singer Sargent’s watercolors, for example, are created with only three layers. Arguably, Sargent’s AWARENESS of what is essential in an image, his vision, is just as impressive as his brushwork.

Simplify and plan.

Just as reducing the number of colors in a painting can improve your work (see Choosing Colors For a Painting…Less Is More!, 9/11/2019, https://leemuirhaman.com/2019/09/11/choosing-colors-for-a-painting-less-is-more/ ), limiting the number of layers (even brushstrokes) you paint is an effective way to simplify your image and create a strong painting. Avoid adding layer upon layer and overworking! Rarely are more than four or five layers necessary.

When planning your painting, IMAGINE a series of layers. This selective vision may take some practice. Strive to peel back each layer of paint to analyze how layers below might be painted.

Work backward – reverse the order in which the paint will be applied. You must mentally remove the darker layers (which will be painted later) from the image. Try to recognize the dark patterns as separate from the lighter shapes. Once you picture the darkest darks and mentally remove them from the picture, you can then analyze and separate light- and middle- value shapes in the same way.

Method.

Usually, you will strive to reserve some whites of the paper in a painting. With that in mind, the first paint layer will then be created by painting your light valued colors, a second layer will contain middle values, and a third layer will be made up of dark values.

More specifically, block in each of the major shapes with its lightest tone, avoiding any areas within the big shapes that should remain lighter and be reserved. The care you must take in painting each layer is dependent on the story to be told by the picture itself. You must decide early on which value layers will tell more of the important information in your specific picture.

For instance, in a high contrast picture with strong, bright light, the later dark values tell the story and pull the picture together. Therefore, the first layers of light and middle values might be applied with less attention, with the dark values painted more carefully. Details would be saved until the later layers. In contrast, in a more subtle image where light and middle values play a bigger role, more care must be taken in the first layers, with consideration of color and texture. Forms may need to be established early in such a painting.

In summary, when the lightest colors have been applied and dried, the second (mid-value) layer can be begun, shape by shape. Then, the third (dark) layer can be added. With each successive layer, less of the picture will be painted, until the final finishing touches (darkest darks) are complete!

May 7, 2020May 11, 2020

Composition!?!

Composition is simply the study of the way things are arranged, whether in art, music, a plate of food, or the furniture in a room. Where we put things makes a statement about our point of view.

DO I HAVE TO FOLLOW ALL THESE RULES?

A lot has been written about composition and it may seem overwhelming to you. There have been many rules formulated about creating good paintings. Often, however, learning these formulas and rules can be dry and boring! It can be difficult to know HOW TO APPLY these rules to specific scenes. And it sometimes feels that the rules prevent you from being creative or being yourself.

First, let me assure you that you need not follow all composition rules slavishly in order to improve your picture. The formulas are guidelines that help you achieve dramatic, effective art that holds your audience’s attention. You can choose several rules that you feel are important to apply to a chosen image – use whichever rules you feel are most useful in getting across what you want to get across in each of your paintings.

WHY?

Composition (arrangement) is everywhere! Since a good composition need not reproduce reality exactly, you are free to use the composition guidelines to rearrange components of your painting. When non-artists look at art they don’t necessarily think about or understand composition. They merely like or dislike a painting. If the art appeals, then you can be confident that the artist used composition skillfully to reach the viewer at an emotional level. Beginning artists, too, can sometimes be surprised to learn about all that is involved in planning a good painting. Strong paintings don’t just happen! They need to be composed.

To get a viewer to see what, as artists, we want them to see, we therefore arrange the elements at our disposal. The TOOLS we use are SHAPE, VALUE, COLOR, TEXTURE.

With the above-mentioned tools, we can create EFFECTS in our composition or arrangement. We consider UNITY and DOMINANCE, try to achieve BALANCE (of value, color, type of line, e.g. diagonal), use PERSPECTIVE, create CONTRAST (of color, value), MOOD, RHYTHM and MOVEMENT, PATTERN, and any other visual effect we might be able to think of.

To better understand these concepts, take a look at three of my related blog posts:

Designing A Strong Painting With Good Composition!, 10/16/2018, https://leemuirhaman.com/2018/10/16/designing-a-strong-painting/ ,

Formats For Effective Compositions (Volume I)…, 10/30/2018, https://leemuirhaman.com/2018/10/30/formats-for-effective-compositions/ ,

Formats For Effective Compositions (Volume II)…, 11/6/2018, https://leemuirhaman.com/2018/11/06/formats-for-effective-compositions-volume-ii/ .

SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS.

More specific suggestions for a good composition include choosing only ONE center of interest. This center of interest should be the reason you are painting the picture. Strive to concentrate the most DETAIL and the greatest CONTRAST (light vs. dark) here.

Further, decide on COLOR DOMINANCE during the initial planning stages of a picture. To avoid confusion, try not to bombard the viewer with every color on your palette in the same picture. Choose early on what the MOOD (feeling) will be for your project. Mood is achieved through the quality of colors chosen for use. Will your painting be cheerful, mysterious, forboding, perhaps subtle? Will you use dark, cool colors and strong contrasts to paint a dramatic, somber, or intense scene? Will you choose lighter, soft colors for a calm serenity? Or you could focus on warm, dulled colors to suggest, for example, a hot, hazy summer day. Both color TEMPERATURE and the INTENSITY (quality) OF LIGHT contribute to mood.

Also, for a successful painting, attempt to include interesting SHAPES (two-dimensions), then creating FORM (the suggestion of three dimensions) by adding patterns of LIGHT and SHADOW. When form has been established, the artist can establish TEXTURE (after careful observation of relationships between shape, form, light, and shadow).

GO-TO REFERENCES.

Many good beginner painting books include a section about composition. Some are incomplete or confusing, and some are better than others. My recommendations for resources on composition include:

The Watercolorist’s Essential Notebook: Keep Painting, (2017), by Gordon MacKenzie.

Watercolor Composition Made Easy, (1999), by David R. Becker.

Mastering Composition: Techniques and Principles To Dramatically Improve Your Painting, (2008), by Ian Roberts.

Watercolor Success!, (2005), by Chuck Long.

Wonderful World of Watercolor: Learning and Loving Transparent Watercolor, (2008), by Mary Baumgartner.

SUMMARY.

Composition, the way things are arranged, has to do with balance, and many factors can be considered. Watercolor artist Zoltan Szabo, in Artist At Work, (p.30-31), (1979), describes good composition as a “balance of shapes, value, color, and texture”. He has said, “I keep the mood (I see), but rearrange the details to emphasize what I consider important, and play down or leave out the trivia. I like to pick a strong center of interest and subordinate everything else to complement it. I feel that composition is a personal thing, and I like my composition to be the way I decide, not the way it really is. I use the elements I find, but rearrange them in a new, more personalized balance.”

April 22, 2020

Perspective With Just A Pencil!

If you are painting outdoors or attempting to paint a still life in front of you, how would you go about drawing realistically with just a pencil and paper? How could you transfer what you see to your painting surface? How can you judge proportion and perspective without error?

To make a drawing look right, we must understand that all parts of a scene (or landscape) are LOCKED into a proportional relationship which doesn’t change. When drawing, your job is to observe carefully what the relationship is and reproduce it accurately. You don’t want to guess what the proportions MIGHT BE or assume what they SHOULD BE. Instead you want to replicate what the proportions actually ARE.

In my last blog, Use The Low-Tech Grid Method To Transfer Your Image, 4/8/20, https://leemuirhaman.com/2020/04/08/use-the-low-tech-grid-method-to-transfer-your-image/, I explained how to use a grid to judge placement, angles, and proportion in a drawing.

However, using just a pencil and paper for drawing is even simpler and faster! The pencil you draw with becomes the tool for comparing and SIGHTING how shapes relate to each other. You take your sighting by holding out the pencil AT ARM’S LENGTH. (Your arm is locked straight out from the body.) You look down your arm and slide your thumb to measure the approximate length of an object. (Your thumb is a SLIDING MEASURING GAUGE.)

In this way, you measure first one portion of a scene or object, while you extend the arm holding the pencil. Hold your thumb steady on the pencil to mark the measure, move your pencil while keeping your thumb in place, and compare the first measurement to the size of a second portion of the scene or object. For example, to find the relationship (RATIO) of the top width of a chair to the height of the chair, place your thumb on the pencil to mark and hold the width. Turn your pencil without moving your thumb, to compare the height to the first width measurement. (If width measures ‘one’, height might be ‘1.5’. In this case, the height of the chair is 1.5 times width of the chair.) You could then easily use this information to create a drawing of the chair.

Continue to measure and compare other areas within your scene to the first measurement in order to figure relative sizes and relationships throughout the picture. Angles can be determined using this method as well.

Once SIGHTING with a pencil is learned , it quickly becomes an effective way to check size, distance, and angles in a drawing. You can scale an image up or down in size while maintaining proper proportions. The technique will become automatic and indispensable as you gather information and look carefully at your scene. The more you look into your subject, the more you will see!

For a quick video explanation of sighting with a pencil, watch this YouTube by Chris Triner, Drawing With Simple Sighting Technique, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otv_l_qkML4

April 8, 2020

Use The Low-Tech Grid Method To Transfer Your Image.

The most useful tools are often the most simple and easiest to use!

Several of you have recently asked how to transfer an image to your watercolor paper when you have no graphite tracing paper or already enlarged template to trace. Here is a simple way to accurately transfer your image.

The grid system of drawing or transferring an image to paper (or other painting surface) has been used for centuries by many artists, including Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer. It is a low-tech, inexpensive tool used to reproduce, decrease, or enlarge an image.

Overview.

Draw a grid of lines over a reference photo, then lightly draw a larger grid (of equal ratio) on your work surface. To calculate the size of the second grid, work backwards from the desired final size of your drawing.

Method. Draw first grid and label.

To use this method, you will need watercolor paper, ruler, pencil, pen, and eraser. Try to work from a black-and-white original image. Draw a grid with pen (so it’s easier to see) directly on your black-and-white template image. You can decide arbitrarily on the size of the squares in the grid, but they must fit evenly on the image. For example, with a 5X6” image you might draw 1” squares – 5 squares across and 6 squares down.

Example of grid over template, 4 squares across, 3 squares down.

When the squares are drawn on your template, LABEL the boxes on left and top, to help you keep your place as you proceed to transfer your image onto your watercolor paper (or other painting surface). You might label boxes down the SIDE with letters – A, B, C, etc. You might label boxes across the TOP with numbers -1, 2, 3, 4, etc. In this way, you keep track of the lines you are transferring from each box to its corresponding box on the second grid. In other words, if you are duplicating box E3 from your template, you will look to work on box E3 on your work surface.

Labeled grid.

Figure and draw second grid, then label.

To create your second grid, determine the final size of the picture you want. Then you’ll need to make some calculations. Will you need to double the size of the original grid squares? Perhaps make them three times as large? What about making them on and a half times as large?

Measure and lightly draw the outer rectangle (or square, whatever your shape) for your final image. Use your ruler to determine the new size of the grid. You want the same number of squares in your second grid (not the same size as the original unless your final image will actually be the same size as your template), with the SAME RATIO of width to length. So, what size squares will fit EVENLY within your rectangle? For simplicity’s sake, let’s decide your final image will be 10’X12”. This would make 2” grid squares a good choice. Lightly draw out your final grid with PENCIL on your paper, and LABEL the new grid in a way similar to the original grid, e.g. with letters down the side and numbers across the top.

Example of original grid, and enlarged second grid with same proportions.

Then, square by square, transfer the same line details to the second grid, one square at a time. Follow the details, from box to box. You look at where the lines start and progress, say in square E3, and approximate the same line placement. Your aim is to recreate similar lines you “see” WITHOUT interpreting and drawing what you think you see.

Get the large shapes penciled in, then begin adding some details. Keep looking at grid labels to keep your place and check placement. When your drawing is finished, check it over. Catch any mistakes now! Smooth out lines in your image and erase grid lines as carefully as well as you can, without damaging your watercolor paper. Then, it’s time to paint!

A final lesson.

Using the grid method encourages the artist to draw what is there without struggling with concepts of how things “should” look. While the grid might seem to be a constraint, it, in fact, liberates the artist from making unintended misperceptions relating to the way they think something looks. See my related blog posts:

Painting Begins With Looking and Seeing…, published 12/18/18, https://leemuirhaman.com/2018/12/18/painting-begins-with-looking-and-seeing/ ,

Avoid Painting Lollipop Trees! (Parts I, II, and III), posted 3/13/19, 3/19/19, and 3/26/19, https://leemuirhaman.com/2019/03/13/avoid-painting-lollipop-trees/ , https://leemuirhaman.com/2019/03/19/avoid-painting-lollipop-trees-part-ii/ , https://leemuirhaman.com/2019/03/26/avoid-painting-lollipop-trees-part-iii/ .

In summary, the grid prevents an artist from changing or misinterpreting important information. A grid can help you measure relative proportions to sidestep any distortions. And, finally, the grid also insures that you observe and take into account necessary constant vertical and horizontal references.

In the next blog post, let’s move beyond the grid method to learn HOW TO DRAW and to transfer perspective and proportion using just a pencil, as a moveable, low-tech “grid” for drawing, perfect for using out doors. The method allows you to transfer what you see without any template. Keep watch!

I’ve got a newsletter! Join me and get painting tips, inspiration, the latest news about classes, new art or products for sale. Subscribe here. I’ll give you a free copy of my Color Blending Tips pdf., that you can download and print.