Watercolor Painting for Dummies (60 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
My backyard is a constant source of inspiration. Maybe one of the reasons I don’t need domestic pets right now is because I have so many wild ones. All kinds of birds, squirrels, and several bunnies are hopping about the yard. I laugh when I think about going outside and pretending to be Snow White.
Bird watching is a huge national pastime. With so many species, colors, shapes, and varieties, you can’t run out of subjects to paint. You can employ every color on the artist’s palette when painting birds.
Birds are so fast that you want to work from photographs. I keep my camera near anytime I think the opportunity to snap a feathered friend’s portrait will arise.
Everything in my mother’s kitchen included roosters: dishes, towels, rugs, and wind chimes. They have always been a family favorite. I laughed when I attended a marketing trends program and heard the new cool motif was roosters. Mom would say they’ve been cool for the last 80 years.
This painting project is in honor of Mom’s favorite bird. Follow the steps, and you’ll end up with a fun and colorful painting that you just may want to display in your own kitchen.
Make sure that adjacent areas are dry before painting next to them in this picture. I bounce around the painting hoping to allow time for each area to dry before going next to it with another wet color. I don’t want any colors to bleed accidentally. But if you’re a fast painter, you need to be aware that each area should be dry if you want separate colors without mingling them.
1.
Trace the drawing in Figure 12-9 and transfer it to a horizontal 5-x-7-inch piece of watercolor paper and activate your paints.
Use tracing paper to copy the drawing. Then place a piece of graphite paper beneath the drawing and on top of the watercolor paper. Retrace the drawing so it transfers to the watercolor paper.
The colors you need to have at the ready are greens (mix your greens from blue and yellow or have hookers green, leaf green, and shadow green), lemon yellow, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, cadmium red, alizarin crimson, purple, and cadmium yellow.
Figure 12-9:
Trace this outline to get started.
2.
Paint the shadows on mama hen, outlining her body to make it round, as shown in Figure 12-10a.
Mix burnt sienna with ultramarine blue to make a black, and add a little water to some of it to make a puddle of gray. My gray is a bit on the blue side, meaning that more blue is in it than burnt sienna.
Figure 12-10:
Underpainting poultry.
3.
Paint the light yellows. I used lemon yellow, but you can use whichever color you have.
Refer to Figure 12-10b to see how to put yellow on the beaks of mama hen and papa rooster, paint the chicks, and put a few patches on the rooster’s neck and rear hip.
4.
Paint the light green.
Add lemon yellow to hookers green for a chartreuse color. Refer to Figure 12-10b to see how to paint some tail feathers on the rooster and a patch on his chest.
5.
Paint the rooster and hen’s feet.
Use cadmium yellow on the legs and feet, referring to Figure 12-10b.
6.
Paint the rooster’s body, as shown in Figure 12-11a.
Use burnt sienna to define some feathers over the yellow on the neck, wing, and rear. Paint hookers green around the light green you painted in Step 4. Mix hookers green and alizarin crimson for a dark green, and make another layer of feathers.
Figure 12-11:
Layers of feathers build up a rooster.
7.
Paint the ground.
Use burnt sienna with a lot of water for a pale sand color and paint around the chicks’ bodies and the birds’ feet (refer to Figure 12-11a for guidance). While the ground is still damp, put a cast shadow under the hen, rooster, and chicks using the blue-gray color from Step 2.
8.
Paint the red.
Save the red for the end because it runs if water gets next to it. Use the cadmium red to paint the waddles and eye patches. See Figure 12-11b for guidance.
Add shadows in the red patches by using a darker red like alizarin crimson. Do some
lifting
in the red patches for some highlights, if desired, where light touches the waddles (Chapter 3 tells you how to lift paint). And add a few feather details for a little bright impact. I painted a few cadmium red lines to represent feathers in the rooster’s back.
9.
Put in burnt sienna details, as shown in Figure 12-12a.
Outline the rooster’s beak, the stripes on his and the hen’s legs, and the chicks’ wings, beaks, legs, and feet.
10.
Add the black details.
Use the black you made in Step 2 from burnt sienna and ultramarine blue to paint the birds’ eyes and the hen’s tail and wings. Outline the hen’s beak, referring to Figure 12-12b for guidance. Dot in some chicken feed for the chicks to peck at on the ground. Now you’re done!
Mama, papa, baby — or small, medium, large — is a good composition rule. The concept is simple and effective: Include one of each size in your painting. By varying the size of items in your painting, you avoid monotony and make your painting more interesting to the viewer. Any shapes will work with the small, medium, and large variation technique. More information on using size as an element of design is in Chapter 1.
Figure 12-12:
Add details to bring the birds to life.
In This Chapter
Leaving a permanent impression of autumn
Putting paint to paper for a polar bear portrait
Illuminating your skills in a lighthouse
Capturing rainbow-bright horses
T
he world abounds with subject matter for you to paint. This chapter gives you four more step-by-step projects to enjoy and paint. Try these and then use the techniques and processes on your own subjects. Just change the colors, observe value changes, and in no time you’ll have watercolors galore!
Carry your camera everywhere to capture images you can transfer to paper later. Stop and draw whenever you can. Celebrate the beauty of nature and commemorate the world you live in.
