Watercolor Painting for Dummies (51 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
While desserts are a sweet topic, deserts are a hot topic. Desert scenes feature palms and cacti and warmer colors.
Paint sand dunes and hills much as you do snow drifts. Stroke on an arc of brown, like burnt sienna, leaving the top of the stroke as a hard edge and softening the underside so it disappears. The tops of hills are lighter because they catch the sunlight, and valleys are darker because they’re in shadow.
Cacti come in many shapes and colors. When painting a desert scene with these prickly plants, notice the different values of each area. Decide if the next area is lighter or darker to make it different from the first surface.
In Figure 10-11 a little desert scene sports several cactus varieties:
The popular round cactus in the middle of the picture is a prickly pear. Paint each oval separately. When those are dry, paint dark ovals around the first light ovals so the light ones come forward. As the cactus ages, it turns a purple color.
The long tube-like cactus on the right is an ocotillo. First paint the light branches and let them dry. Next paint the dark ones. You can lift the branches in front if you forgot one.
The spines or needles of cacti can be painted dark or scratched out with a razor blade for white needles after everything is bone dry.
Notice the variety in the greens. Start with either hookers green or sap green. Add yellow to make the bright green and burnt umber to make the earthier green.
Figure 10-11:
A cactus garden.
Try neutralizing the green for a cactus with burnt sienna rather than alizarin crimson for a hotter green.
You can simplify a palm tree into a few strokes of your brush — it’s a lot of steps, but only a few strokes, and after you get the hang of it, you’ll be painting palm trees in your sleep.
1.
Choose a piece of 5-x-7-inch watercolor paper and turn it vertically, and activate your paints.
You’ll need hookers green, lemon yellow, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, and violet.
2.
Paint the trunk of the palm tree.
Using burnt sienna, make the trunk by starting at the bottom and pushing a round #12 brush down on its side to make the widest possible base.
Move up the trunk in a gentle arc lifting the pressure off the brush to reduce the size of the stroke until you’re using just the tip (see Figure 10-12).
Figure 10-12:
Trunk of the palm.
3.
Let the trunk dry before you put some fronds on top.
4.
Add a
frond
(a palm tree leaf).
Load the round brush with hookers green watercolor. Touch the tip of the brush to the top of the trunk, which serves as the center for the green top. Start at the center, and pull the frond out in an arc, pushing down on the brush as you pull away from the center, so the stroke widens. As you reach the end of the frond, lift the pressure so the stroke gets narrower (see Figure 10-13a).
5.
While the paint is still wet, pull little lines out with the tip of the damp brush (see Figure 10-13b).
Figure 10-13:
Adding the fronds from the trunk.
There should be enough paint on the green palm to pull some little wisps down. If not, load some paint in the brush and paint them on.
6.
Radiate more fronds out of the center by repeating Steps 4 and 5.
7.
While the paint is damp, drop in some lemon yellow near the top to give the illusion of sunlight touching the fronds (see Figure 10-14).
Figure 10-14:
Adding sunlight to the fronds.
8.
After the paint is dry, add dark semi-horizontal burnt sienna lines to the trunk and lift out some lighter lines (see Figure 10-15a).
9.
Use ultramarine blue and violet to create a glaze, and use it over the dry trunk to define its round form (see Figure 10-15b).
Figure 10-15:
Highlighting and glazing the trunk.
10.
Use a liner brush to add some simple wriggly green lines to make ground and grass to anchor the tree.
Figure 10-16 shows the final result of these steps.
Figure 10-16:
The finished palm tree.
