Watercolor Painting for Dummies (43 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
The first thing you need to do to paint a still life is to find some items you want to look at long enough to create a painting. I love dishes and all the paraphernalia you find in the kitchen and dining room. You may like some type of collectible. Anything that will sit still is fair game. It’s a great excuse to get the toys out and play.
And, speaking of playing,
play
is a good term. You’re trying out compositions by arranging and playing with the items. Move the parts around until the composition feels right. (Chapter 7 tells you all you need to know about composition.)
Use these steps to get started with your arrangement for a still life:
1.
Choose the surface you want to set up on.
Traditionally, items are arranged on a table. Now, on top of the table do you want to arrange some fabric or place a doily or go for the bare look? The upcoming “Setting the Scene: Surfaces and Backgrounds” section talks about surfaces.
2.
Consider the background.
Look at the color behind your surface. Decide whether you want to change it by draping fabric behind as a backdrop. Maybe you want something behind the still-life grouping to balance it — a window or more art?
3.
Find the elements you want to paint and arrange them on the surface in various ways until you find an arrangement you like.
Take into account what you like to paint. Decide whether the items you’ve chosen go together and whether they need to relate to each other.
Moving the items around is like making a drawing, but much easier because you don’t have to erase! Set items in front of other items to create interesting compound shapes. Look for negative areas between the shapes. Balance horizontal items with a vertical item.
Set up an arrangement that pleases you. Play.
4.
Experiment with light.
You can set up a light to create dramatic light and shadows.
Some artists go so far as to set up a still life inside a box with just one open end in order to control the light. You can easily pin fabric to the cardboard back as a backdrop. Then clamp a light source to the top. This way the light on the still life isn’t influenced by overhead lighting or other lights you may need to paint with.
Playtime is over and it’s time to get to work on the painting. But that’s no problem because this work is enjoyable.
You probably have an infinite number of choices when it comes to the surface on which you set your still life. You can set up on a piece of furniture or a countertop. You can elevate it by setting it up on a box and draping fabric over the box.
Likewise, you can choose all sorts of backgrounds to frame your items. You can use draped fabric, a wall, a wall with another piece of art on it, or nothing at all — just some colors swirled behind.
Think about the contrast of values and colors with the items you are placing on your surface and in front of your background. Do you want to have items fade into the background? Then choose a background with a similar value to the item. Do you want the item to jump out dramatically? Then choose high contrast values: a light object against a dark background, for example. Colors can be placed next to each other to be a bit dramatic as well. When you place a complement or a near-complement (opposites on the color wheel) next to a color, it almost vibrates with energy. Or maybe you want to explore subtle colors and use
analogous colors
(neighbors on the color wheel). The possibilities are limitless. (Chapter 5 has more information on color.)
In this section, I address some of the more common surfaces and challenge you to find uncommon ways to use them.
Often I don’t want anything to distract from the still life itself. Because the items can be busy and have lots of texture, a simple surface gives the eye a resting place.
Sometimes the objects in a still life look like they’re floating in space. The solution is to ground them with shadows, surface edges, and crevice darks where the items touch the tabletop. You can also use the division between tabletop and background wall, which is sometimes called a
horizon line
(turn to Chapter 8 for more on horizon lines and perspective). Making a horizon line stops the foreground surface and solves the problem of the items
floating.
Defining the horizon by a line with a graded wash that fades as it comes forward gives your painting depth without making it fussy or distracting. You may think of other ways to make a gradation separate the surface or background. The background could be dark at the horizon line and fade as it ascends. You can use all sorts of combinations to define the background from the foreground.
Cast shadows can be an interesting line to lead the eye into the painting without making an area too busy. See what I mean in Figure 9-1. The cast shadows are so interesting that a patterned cloth or fabric would be inappropriate and distracting.
Figure 9-1:
Simple foreground with a horizon and cast shadows.
Wood is easy to paint in watercolor. Careful observation can help you reproduce any type of wood color and grain.
The beauty of wood is the range of colors it comes in. When you’re mixing colors for wood, follow these suggestions:
For light woods, such as oak, pine, ash, and poplar, start with a light yellow such as yellow ochre.
For darker woods, such as maple, fruitwood, cherry, mahogany, dark oak, and walnut, start with a burnt sienna. You can mix it with a little alizarin crimson for the darker woods.
To make your brown even darker, add ultramarine blue. Sounds weird, but it works great.
Look for contrasts in value. If your subjects are dark, perhaps they look best against a light wood. Light and pale subjects would pop against a dark wood. Some woods are very reflective and can offer all kinds of challenges.
Adding grain details to your surface makes the wood look more realistic. Follow these steps to paint a wood surface. The example I use is oak.
1.
Start with a
wash
(lots of water with a little pigment) across the whole wood surface.
In Figure 9-2, I applied yellow ochre with a 1/2-inch flat brush to replicate the color of oak.
Figure 9-2:
The first layer for oak.
You can make more wood grain texture by
dry brushing
(using paint with not much water) with a fan brush over the top of this initial background wash.
2.
Let it dry.
3.
Use a liner brush to paint the lines representing the grain.
I used burnt sienna that was a little less diluted for the oak grain, as you can see in Figure 9-3. If you need a darker brown, add ultramarine blue to your burnt sienna.
If you want any lighter spots, lift them out with a damp brush and blot with your tissue. (Chapter 3 tells you how to lift paint.)
Figure 9-3:
Detail lines define a wood grain.
To make the wood look like it’s receding into space, incorporate some perspective ideas: Make your wash darker in the back and lighten it toward the front. You can also have the grain lines in Step 3 get closer together as they go farther away.
