The above image is by Wilson Steer.  Remarkable simplification.  Done from top to bottom, back to front letting each wash dry.  Using loaded brush with juicy washes that are impossible to use to get any detail.  Nothing linear.  Varying the greens — maybe 4 or 5.  A “repoussoir tree” to the left (see below). (His oils are nothing like this.)  I think he showed the way for many subsequent watercolorists who didn’t take it this far.

No discussion of trees would be complete without a reference to Ivan Shiskin.  Here is one tree I like, an  oak, but it’s in oil.   The sky’s great also.   Shiskin did watercolors, but I haven’t been able to find any of trees.

It’s an unusual composition.  The usual approach was to make the foreground dark on a landscape giving the viewer something to get over to get into the painting. — a lot like the idea of “repoussoir” I mention immediately below.  Also in this case the immediate foreground is quite developed with the dark in-between it and the tree.   There a lot of bands of light and dark (“counterchange”, also discussed below.)

And here is an Alexandre Calame tree(s) worth knowing about:

The differences between the decisions made by Shiskin and Calame are interesting particularly in terms of the overall tone (that is intensity of the colors).

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I was struck by a remark of Ian King to the effect that you never put a tree in a painting without a reason for doing so. This, first of all, means that you do not put a tree in a painting because it happens to be what you see before you when you set up to paint.

Actually this advice applies to anything that you see before you when you start to paint.  You are making a painting and what you see is merely a “reference”.  You go outside because  it’s easier to find the references.   If you had an idea for a figure painting, you would call a model  to pose for you  if you could, even if  it only was a friend or family member, because nobody has good enough long-term visual memories to retrieve all the nuances of a figure.  Well, that’s the function of landscape objects.  When you go outside: they are posing for you.  Unfortunately, you can’t tell them to move, bend, or act differently, but you can turn around and pick and choose.

This may seem strange, but in my own case there are two ways I can go about making a painting.  The first is to look at the scene before me, try to keep it in visual memory, and then look down at my paper and try to “see” it there as if I were projecting it from a camera — and draw or paint this projection. It naturally requires many fast looks at the subject and paper since short term visual memory can only hold a very small piece of the subject for a very short time.   So in this first case, my eye goes from the subject to the paper.  In the second case, I look at the paper and try to visualize what is needed there, perhaps thinking of a painting I have seen that is like what I want to do,  and then look up and see what I can use in the scene before me.  This second approach is better for me.  It produces a better painting.

Stapleton Kearns, on his website here, has a lot to say in two blog posts about this topic which he calls “revisualization” and recommends doing thumbnail sketches to enhance this process.

So what does a tree do in a painting.   I would like to introduce two terms:  Repoussoir and Counterchange.

REPOUSSOIR

Repoussoir is a French term used in composition to refer to something in the foreground like a curtain which blocks part of the view and, as we would say today, directs the viewer’s eye into the painting.  Paradoxically the term means in French an extractor, a person or thing which extracts or draws out, or a device which draws out or removes, so the metaphor is reversed.  That is, the object painted more or less at the edge of the picture plane and often cropped is considered to draw the rest of painting out rather than the eye inward.   Anyone who is literate about art criticism or composition knows this term, incidentally.  Trees are often used like this.

Johann Georg von Dills

The tree on the right is being used as a repoussoir.  I found this lovely drawing on the internet with the search term of “repoussoir tree” because several commentators use that term in describing it.  (Just in case you think the term is my invention.)   Notice that by placing that tree in the repoussoir position, von Dillis was doing what Ian King suggest we do.  That tree is there for a reason.

This is a watercolor by John Varley, Jr. of repoussoir trees at the entrance to a Japanese temple.  The technique of depicting  trees follows the same convention as the von Dillis drawing above it.   And this is a convenient time to point the technique out.

Look at the top of the Dillis tree on the right to see what I mean about technique.  The foliage of trees was conceived during the Romantic Era of painting in terms many monochromatic small globular forms whose outline was made with tight, very varied scalloped edges.  Dillis is a bit sloppy and worked fast repeating his scallops a lot while Varley spent considerably more time on it and making the scallops more varied.   Every now and then there has to be a deep scallop.   It was the outline that was emphasized.   I happen to like the look and often sketch trees this way.

Corot “Draftsman near a Cascade at Malmaision, 1822

This closeup of a Corot drawing  makes it clearer how the Romantics did foliage.  The pencil outlines would be filled in with watercolor.  By the way, Corot  was inspired to become an  artist after seeing a group of watercolors by Richard Parks Bonington in 1818, but Corot’s father, a wealthy draper, refused to let Corot do so although he asked every year.  However, he relented ten days after Corot made this drawing (not because of it, however).  In 1825 Corot left for a three year stint in Italy, and landscape painting has never been the same since.  Bonington died at 25.

Why Bonington was such a success and impressed Corot so much, as well as lots of other artists (Delacroix, for example, with whom he shared a studio) was that he was English and trained there in their watercolor technique (the same stuff I’m talking about here in this blog), but the French had never seen anything like that and were amazed.

This idea about how to do the foliage of trees replaced the previous depiction of every leaf like the image  below.

This is a part of the Pieter Brugel the Elder from the Metropolitan Museum showing the idea of painting every leaf.

We have gone way beyond this, of course, probably starting with Corot who since Italy often painted the globular forms using the brush mark to form the edge of the form.

Here’s a plein air oil I did which is in this mode, perhaps pushing it a bit,  not unlike a few other artists do.

Central Park Bridge

Below: A tree image you’ve got to know about

We can juxtapose the idea that we put in a tree to do something with the approach of Frederick Lord Leighton, a Victorian painter.  He spend all of every day for one week when he was on Capri drawing a lemon tree.   It has become an  infamous tree image among painters, a rebuke actually, so you should at least know of its existence.  A partial reproduction follows, but you still can’t see the snails on the tree trunk.

Lord Leighton, who was the first artist to be raised to the English peerage (I believe), gave the drawing to John Ruskin, a very influential art critic, and it is still in the Oxford Museum.  Leighton did so in  the hopes that the drawing would “impede, if possible, the increasing wrong-headedness in study — the careless conceit, the irrelevant dash, the incompetent confidence of many modern students.”  Leighton must have been pretty angry and feeling threatened to spend an entire week on Capri drawing a tree. It’s a pretty poor reason to make a drawing, or in Ian King’s terms to put a tree into a work of art.  He would probably have a heart attack if he read the rest of this post.  If he were alive, I would say to him that botanical drawing is a legitimate genre, and there are many botanical artist who can do as well as he did.  But botanical illustration is not the only genre.  Also it’s not that Matisse, Monet (those lily pads are perfect ellipses in perspective, getting smaller as they are further way) , or Picasso — even  Cezanne–  couldn’t draw as well as Leighton.  They chose not to.  You don’t need that level of detail or precision to communicate with people.  It’s as if Leighton is communicating with 5000 words where 500 would do.

Now take a look at this:

This is how we do trees today!   Well, that’s an exaggeration, of course.  That’s the way the the majority of modern English watercolorists do it.    It’s not hard to do, but there are two rules.

1.  First of all put lots of paint on your brush and then blot it once, on it’s side. I use a toilet paper role with the cardboard tub removed and squashed down a bit.   Lots of paint because you want to make a strong mark otherwise the dry brush mark will be so light as to have no impact.

2. Second, use your brush on its side (“dry brush”) and never go over the mark.  If you do, it will become a solid passage, not dry brush, with no little sparkles in them.  (By the way in the above illustration I did not put in trunks or branches in the illustration and I didn’t scrape out some light trunks either — all things that would be good to try.)

Rough paper makes it easier to get a very prominent dry brush effect and many artists favor it.  As I mention below, it’s a good idea to put the bottom line in first and to work from the top of the tree down and to the side with your dry brush stroke.

Just as I recommend to you to practice skies when you had nothing to do, you can practice trees this way on scrap paper or, perhaps, over old sky sketches.  As you do, you will start to develop a calligraphy that is yours.  You have to develop some of your own ideas about the design:  should the forms droop, spread out, be dark in the middle, etc.

Here’s and Edward Seago tree (Lord Leighton is turning over in his grave)  By the way the gate is important for scale and was used a great deal by Seago. :

Edward Seago

the next topic is:

You may be puzzled by the use of this word as I was.  Because it’s dictionary definition is:

• counterchange [ˌkaʊntəˈtʃeɪndʒ]vb (tr)
• 1. to change parts, qualities, etc.
• 2. Poetic to chequer, as with contrasting colours
• Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

What it means to most artists is to compose light against dark, intense colors against dull (“grave”) colors, and warm against cool colors.    It’s probably a good idea at the start of a painting to do a little sorting, darks in one pile and lights in another, intense colors in one pile dull grays in another.  The same holds for big and small forms, warm and cool vibrations.

This is, of course, whether or not this counterchange occurs in your subject.  Trees being dark forms are often the best way to introduce counterchange into your painting, for example, light sky and dark trees against it.  But there is counterchange even inside forms:  if the right side of a tree is light then the branches are dark and vise versa.

Counterchange is often discussed just in terms of values –darks and lights, but it applies to contrasts  in every which way:  small forms against big forms, round forms against jagged forms, intense colors against gray colors, and what is sometimes called the “vibration of colors” by placing warm against cool often closely related colors.

Trees fits this idea in a remarkable number of ways:  they can be big and small, bright and dull, warm and cool, etc.  They are very useful to introduce counterchange in all its forms into a painting.

Where that edge is between light and dark, intense colors and gray, etc is where the eye is attracted.  We have special wetware in our brains to exaggerate the differences at edges — the light is a little lighter and the dark a little darker at the edge.  And some artists recommend doing that yourself at an edge.

by Peter Woolley

Notice how the trunk of the tree is dark at the top against a light sky and light at the bottom against dark background.  It’s not a complete painting, of course.  The trick would be to introduce counter change along a few more dimensions:  intense color versus gray, warm against cool, etc

Verticals

Another thing that trees do is introduce vertical structures.

trees by location

In keeping with the dictum to start you painting in the distance and procedure to the foreground, I want to divide the problem of painting trees into three types:  trees on the horizon, trees in the mid ground, and trees in the foreground.

trees on the horizon

Many landscapes have a distant range of trees, either mountains or a low row on the horizon.   It is important for these trees to be blue not green, light in color, and low in saturation (that is, somewhat gray).   The more atmosphere between you and where these trees are (for example a hazy day) the more blue, light in value, and gray these trees should be.

I should mention it doesn’t matter what color you yourself see them to be.  Make them blue and each successive layer in the distance lighter in color.

It is easier to paint a low line of trees on the horizon if you first put down a straight line for the bottom of the tree line.  Then you can use the side of a brush to either go up from that line or down to that line.   The point is the horizon line has to be level and putting in the bottom line first assures you of that.

Hopefully you can vary this distant tree mass by making it taper off at one end.  A perfect bar of trees all the same height, is boring compositionally.

trees in the mid ground

Usually such a tree group includes some grasses or shrubs at the base of these trees.   It’s still a good idea to first put in a bottom line for the group including the grasses.

I think it’s helpful to put in such a group of trees if there is a very big open space between the foreground and the distant horizon.  It gives the eye somewhere to stop between them.

foreground trees

A lot of what follows applies to foreground trees.

GREEN:  The major problem with trees and foliage

There is just too much green in the summertime, in particular a very high key chartreuse in spring that one is  tempted to mix with a thalo blue gs and cadmuim yellow.  You would do better to follow Joseph Zbukvic’s approach and mix a similar green, or at least one that can take its place, from turquoise and cad yellow.  In fact, because of the green problem, some landscape artists solve the problem by migrating to the shore in the height of the summer returning to the upland woods in the fall and winter.  If you’re stuck upland in a sea of green, the advice is to look for reflections in some body of water.

Another method of dealing with the overload of green is to “smuggle red” (Stapelton Keans’ term) into the trees.  It’s surprising how to you can tuck accents of red into the shadows.  Many artists used to carry what is now called “caucasian flesh color” around to kill the green a little bit, but would never think to use it for portraits or figures.  Other painters use some sort of pink or rose color.  In oil paint Williamsburg Persian Rose seems favored.  Stapleton Kearns started mixing up a color he called “Porn Star Pink”, a great name, which his painter friends liked so much he makes a quart at a time and tubes it for them.  It is a mixture of quinacrodone rose (PV19)  and pyrrole orange (PO73).

The orange for Porn Star Pink in watercolor paints is called Winsor Orange by Winsor Newton, Pyrrol Orange by Daniel Smith, Warm Orange by Rowney, and Scarlet Pyrrol by M. Graham. The rose is Permanent Rose by Winsor Newton and others.

John Yardley sometimes doesn’t use green at all for foliage but more a brown-like color which looks to me like he gets it from his favorite “Warm Sepia” to which he adds other colors.  (Winsor Newton doesn’t make  Warm Sepia anymore, but Old Holland does.  W&N suggests adding Burnt Sienna to their Sepia to warm it up– actually that would be more Burnt Sienna since their Sepia is black and Burnt Sienna already.)

Finally, it’s probably better to mix greens from blues and yellows and then add browns or orange to taste than to use tube paints because you don’t want everything the same green.   In fact, you don’t want your green to be recognizably a tube color.  I love Sargent’s watercolors, but he used Viridian out of the tube so much that it’s boring. John Yardley, for example, always starts all his greens from Prussian Blue and then adds yellow and browns to the mixture.

One common solution to green in abundance, is to go very dark with a few light accents.  This creates counterchange which is very attractive.  Homer’s trees in his Adirondack paintings are often close to black with a few small lighter trees here and there.   If you look at a series of good English impressionist watercolors (I have about 30 of them rotating in my screen saver) you will be impressed how little is the number of really green trees.  There a lot of very dark ones, gray ones, blue ones that are not really that far back to warrant such atmospheric perspective, etc.  As is often the case, the values are right and this can allow just about any color.

I’ve written a post in a series about rational palette design on this blog called “If you had one green to use, which one would it be?” here which may be of interest to you.

What trees look like: tree anatomy

The problem with painting trees is like the problem with painting anything else.  We start off having not spent a lot of time looking closely at trees, and, if we are not careful, we will paint a schematic tree that looks how trees are stored in long term visual memory (a green lollipop form) and like kids are taught to paint trees.  When you really get to know trees, they are very different life forms than we tend to think they are.

First of all, each tree is an individual.  It’s usually a good idea to sketch in the overall form of each tree in your initial drawing, so you don’t have cookie cutter trees all in a line.  You also want to vary the green in each tree at the same time softening the edges and letting the trees merge with each other.  If you are painting a grove of trees, you want each tree to be a part of the overall group and individual at the same time.  Not much different than painting a crowd of people.

I know that’s not all that helpful, so I’m going to add that I would paint a grove of trees in the mid distance by first painting a one color sketch of the whole group of them and then, when that gets pretty dry,  dropping in other subtle colors.  If the original wash gets too dry, I would use first  add paint and then water to soften edges.

tree limbs: (remember “telescope”)

I think tree limbs are the hardest to get right.

The big mistake is trying to paint a branch with one stroke and a constant taper. Branches have segments often going off in different directions.

Long tree limbs take years to grow but they do so  little by little.  Every year the end buds compete with each other for which direction to grow in and only one usually wins.  The others die off.  But this means that there is a slightly different direction every year as this end bud grows into a segment of a branch in a corrected direction to get the most sun, and, if you look, you can see a tree limb zigs and zags.

As the limb of a tree grows each year it does not continue the taper of the previous grown part of the limb.  It is more like sections of a telescope.  Younger parts of a limb are smaller but not as tapered as you would think.  If you think “telescope”, you will have better branches.

Different trees have different angles to their branches.  Some London Plane trees and old Oaks send out huge branches to the side while Elms tend to reach upward and form an overall bottle shape.  Tree identification books usually have silhouettes of tree forms which are quite distinct.  see here. It’s helpful to peruse such a book to get an idea of what the forms are although in general tree identification books are not helpful.

tree trucks

Winslow Hommer tree trunk

Simple vertical lines indicate the bark.  Notice the counterchange.  Blue against yellow are “visual” not “mixing” complements.   Also notice that he makes the “greens” very dark blue with an occasional green-yellow dab which makes the entire passage read like it is “greenery” without overdoing the green.

People tend to make the trunk too long.  they are more like the stem of an apple.  Also trunks do not grow straight up.  It’s nice if they lean a little bit one way or another and there are bumps that break the cylinder shape.  At ground level they widened and have very interesting shapes like big snakes coming out and diving into the ground.  That is, the roots show.   Being a romantic at heart, I try to make really interesting trunks not just clean cylinder shapes.

One way that I have found to paint tree trunks is to put down a wash over the whole area of the trunk or else most of the vertical leaving some lighter, unpainted area on one side,  raw umber is what I usually start with, and then, as it is drying, scrap down it with the blade of a pocket knife to make vertical lighter marks which, with paper with bumps like rough paper, also adds some spots in those lighter marks (texture).  The truck still has to have some shadow added to round off  the form, but that’s easy and you can scrape into that also.  If you put down a side shadow, you will want to make the inner edge soft by running a brush just with water over the inside edge so it is not sharp.

There are some trees like London Plane trees that I wash in a dull green and actually let it dry, then go over it again with raw umber and scrape through that which reveals a greenish texture.  Sometimes I try Brunt Sienna.  Just about anything works.

Here’s a drawing  I did originally to understand a  tree I wanted to put into a painting, and, as I did it, I realized there were a series of pitfalls I tended to fall into and had to correct or avoid.   The first trick is to only draw the big main branches.  There were a lot of confusing branches criss-crossing the image that I was trying to draw that obscured the form.    I’ve marked an “A” where the problem is that branches come out of the main trunk in an organic way, not like dowels stuck in a hole.  Branches have shoulders.   I’ve marked a “B” where there are abrupt changes of direction which it is useful to exaggerate.  At “C” I am calling attention to the fact that the tree has to look connected to the ground.  It’s roots spread out above ground.   The tree has to also be connected to the rest of the painting.  In the drawing the right side of the bottom of the tree blends into the dark of the rock better, what James Gurney calls “shape welding” which connects the tree to more of the picture, so it doesn’t look cut out and pasted on.

the crown of the tree

Here’s one way of doing trees at a distance with back lighting:

FIRST:

In the background there is blue sky and pure cadmium yellow behind the trees.  When these two washes are dry, some light green dabs are scattered about and left to dry.

NEXT

You keep putting the green in darker dabs around.  There are some blue trees in the distance, and finally you add some “verticles” (tree trunks remember to show the “shoulders” of the branches and attach the trunks to the ground.)  It would be good to add a center of attraction here like a person and a dog.

Here’s a copy I did of a closer to the viewer scene by Winslow Homer leaving out  the center of interest. ( I think it was a boy going hunting with his dog.)  It uses pretty much the same strategy.  The lighter colors (yellow, orange) are put in first, allowed to dry, and then a succession of darker greens were put in.

Putting it all together

You have to be sure that

1.the crown fits on the truck , that is the trunk tucks into the crown

2.  The branches “telescope” and twist  and are not illustrated with one quick stroke

3. the branches fit on the truck, they have “shoulders”

3. The trunk fits into the ground, the roots snake into the ground

4. and the tree fits into the picture, it can’t look like a cutout pasted into the picture, so you have to merge some of the edges and combine shadows with the main form.

The most important aspect of painting a tree is to make sure the model from which you’re working  is “picturesque”.    What I mean by that is:  just don’t paint any old tree.  You have to paint a nice looking one, a picturesque one.

In the book by William Gilpin “Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, &c, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty made in the summer of the year 1770″  (it’s still in print) the good reverend, who made “picturesque” a fad,  went through the South Wales country side criticizing it.  He would say things like the view from here is pretty good but there is an ugly tree that ruins it.   There something amusing about his stance treating being in nature like being in a gallery, but he started a movement.   It was a completely new take on landscapes, criticizing and praising them as if they were paintings.  But it does make a difference.  Most trees are really not very interesting.  City trees are often suffering even in the parks.  However, some trees are magnificent, beautiful, unusual, etc.  If you keep an eye out for these trees, and perhaps take a photo, you’ll have a better idea what to put in your paintings.  The trees planted on the side of highways are particular strong looking.  The do not have immediate neighbors and have good light.   They may even be special versions of their species.  They reach out in all directions for the light and have abundant leaves, but at the same time, have abundant interior room between the boughs.

When you paint the crown of the tree, the foliage, you are dealing with:

• background sky (light)
•  branches (dark)
• light “airy” leaves (just slightly darker than sky). You dry brush these in with a sideways brush.   As Stapleton Kearns points out, to make airy leaves like in early spring or late fall, you work with a light sky, slightly darker leaves, and very dark branches.  All three are necessary to get the airy effect.  The considerably darker branches are essential.
• sky holes which decrease in size from the center of the tree to the periphery.
• The sky in sky holes is darker in value than the open sky. It’s nice to have the sky hole reveal a forked branch.  Of course, you don’t put in the sky holes you see because there usually are too many of them.  You make an interesting pattern.

“Bog Man” by James Gurney from his blog Gurney Journey.   The blue is reflected sky, the greenish brown is seeing into the water.  Notice how the marks get smaller and less intense in the distance (atmospheric perspective, so to speak.)  The shadow blocks the sky reflection, so we see into the water further a get a more intense color.

Another pretty simple, but effective, treatment of water.

Everything that you paint (a tree, water, a brick wall, windows in a house) is a “problem” that has to be solved.  This is an important mind set.  You are not painting a puddle.  You are solving the problem of how to make a smear on the paper look wet like a puddle of water. (In fact, since puddles are mostly in the immediately foreground, you can leave often just blank paper (but more on that later.)  You are trying to “translate” water into your own visual language.  You probably know the game of charades in which you try to act out something so that your audience guesses it.  Well, in this case you are trying to “paint out” something.  Most bodies of water are fairly easy.

Before you start painting you should be able  to

1.  Recognize the problem for what it is

2. Conjure up in your mind, if only for a moment or so, how other watercolorists solved this problem.   I actually have a little 4″ x 6″ softcover book one of the photo printing places on the internet made for me of watercolors images done by various artists to look at in the field.

I was with a friend painting in central park.  The subject was a man making huge soap bubbles.  We were looking at them, and he said we should check Chardin’s boy with a bubble.  Another time we were looking at early airy leaves.  He said Van Gogh and Millet did them very well.  The point is that, not only did he recognize each of these tasks as “problems”, he knew how other artists had handle them.

You should know something about the problem itself.  For example,one of the problems of painting water is mostly how do you make water  look wet?

Edward Wesson  for example,always tried to put a post in the water which, among other things, could have a broken reflection and refraction that signaled the surface of the water to the viewer.   But the point here is that he understood that painting water meant solving several problem including the  problem of making water look wet.  In the above picture, which is a category of problem called “still water” where waves don’t help, I think that even the post on the shore for tying up a boat makes us understand that there is water there.

There are a few common understandings about painting water.

1.  It owes its tonal value to the light of the sky but is just slightly darker.  You can run the sky down into the water because some of the reflections are light, but you are going to put another wash over it.

2.  The distance edge of the body of water is parallel to the top and bottom of the paper just like the horizon is otherwise it can look like the water is flowing upwards.

3. The edges of bodies of water are usually much darker or lighter than the main surface of the water.  Think “beach” or rocks.   This means that you have to reserve some paper at the distant shore or scratch it out as Winslow Homer did in the painting below.

4.  It is easier to paint ripples across a passage represent water if you turn your paper sideways so that you are painting them up and down.  That way they will not run and make the ripples or waves look like they sag.

5.  The closer to a body of water you are, that is the more you are looking directly down in into water the more you will see through it, and the color will be given to it by what is on the bottom.  Light going into water is called “refraction.” If you are looking at it at a much smaller angle, like the Wesson painting above, you will see the refection of the sky.  In general, then, distant water is lighter than water that is close.   In general, water will be a combination of sky color and blue.  In the Wesson above notice the water is yellow in spots and blue.  It works although there is no particular reason to have the two colors the way he has since each goes from the distance to the front.

6.  Like with painting skies you can put down some clear water, but this time in thin straight lines so that, when you put a wash over it in the water color, some of it will be lighter and look like waves.

7.  Reflections of objects on the shore help to make people understand that what you are painting is water.  In reality the color of something in a reflection is slightly darker than in the air because at least some of the light is lost into the water.  Vertical reflections seem to maintain their shape but horizontal ones are more broken up.

8.  Something in the water (like a post) or on the water (like a boat –even a cliche distant sailboat) help people to get that it is water.

Ian King’s way to sketch out a boat is worth noting:

Ian King’s way to sketch in a boat

9.  In general people get that something is water even if it is quite generically or schematically done much like they “get” that Wesson trees are trees in the above painting.  Remember we are not trying to make a topographical picture but an impressionistic one.

Winslow Homer

This bears some careful study.  Notice the white scratched out (?) line of the beach in the distance.  The stormy sky is being reflected in the water, so it is not blue but black.  (There is a mountain in the background that is blue.)  It is not as monochromatic as it looks.  I think, of you click on it a few times, you can get a larger image.

This is an Edward Gregory painting (oil) that includes a shadow of the canoe and a reflection of the canoe with shadows from the foliage falling across all of it in shallow water with a hint of the bottom.

Breaking Waves on a Beach

This is, perhaps, the most complicated water problem.  It is complicated because there are a great many parts to the image, and without a “search image” you’ll miss them.  Therefore, I am going to start with the “anatomy” of the situation.  I have added labels to the photograph below of a rather plebeian photo of a wave.  You are going to have to click on it to get it bigger.

here are the parts:

1. sky

2.horizon

The horizon has to be perfectly level although there are some people who put a very subtle curve making the center very slightly higher.

3. breaker foam on the top of the wave

4. the face of the wave

notice that at the base of the face there is a shadow

also notice that the top of the wave is crashing down, but the base of the wave is being pulled up into the top so there are streaks of foam

5.  The eye of the breaker (to the left) which is usually the thinnest and most transparent part and often more yellow.  It is probably the part that draws the viewer’s gaze

6.  blanket foam

This is not represent well in the photo.  It often has many different sized ellipses of white foam surrounding blue water.

Here’s a better picture of blanket foam being pulled up onto the face of a breaking wave:

The picture right above is of blanket foam.  Notice how complicated it is.  The underlying blue varies from light to dark, the foam makes very complicated elliptical forms and has grays and very light blues in it.

It’s very hard to represent blanket foam or similar water patterns in watercolor, mainly because there are no shortcuts.  Here a painting by Manara, who is usually referred to as a comic book artist (note the prominent line.  The image has been “inked”) .  Manara’s work is often openly erotic, but he is a wonderful painter:  Only a watercolor artist who look at how the water is done rather than the woman!  But he does tend to draw the same female figure.

While we’re at it here’s another what for us(!) is another Manara water picture including a waterfall in the background:

7.  Secondary wave.  Not shown in the photo.  This is the previous wave on top of the blanket foam.

7.  terminal foam

The last part of the wave washes up on the beach ending in a little wave

8.  wet sand

often reflects the sky but some sand shows through

9. dry sand

The color of the ocean behind the wave is darker blue than the wave and has variations in its color,  the face of the wave has two colors since the base and the shadow are darker

In an actual course I’d go through painting all these elements, but there is a wonderful DVD on the subject by Susie Short, a very likable and competent Seattle watercolorist and teacher of watercolor techniques (who is good at teaching).  It’s called Making Waves, Techniques for Painting Ocean Waves in Watercolor.  She also publishes a pamphlet on the subject. take a look here.  She took the trouble to go to the seashore and study waves.

My one criticism is that she is not very focused on blanket foam as a problem.  The people who paint it well , as far as I can see,  such as Manara actually  paint it in detail.  As I understand it, the foam come about because the crashing wave pushes some of its water (which is very aerated) down underneath the water of the blanket foam which then bubbles up in columns.

fragment of painting by Joseph Zbukvic

We are going to put in some washes, for example the distant mountains, following the rule to start:

1.  from the distance to the foreground and

2.  from the top of the paper to the bottom and

3.  from the side away from your dominant hand to that of your non-dominant hand (right to left for right-handers.)

4. from light to dark (“dark over light”)

5.  to preserve the whites

Our Day One washes were very wet paint on  a partially flooded, very wet paper.  The consistency  of the wash (actually the “viscosity”) was like tea or water which is a viscose as a liquid can be.   (It is 1 on a scale of viscosity whereas corn syrup is 3000.) We now have to put in some thicker or more viscous washes on a paper of varying degrees of wetness.

Transparent watercolor differs from most other types of painting because of the different types of washes that occur allowing the painter to describe different atmosphere and light conditions in a way that is more genuine than in other mediums.

If we look at the above  fragment of a Joseph Zbukvic painting we see a brown reflection on the water portrayed probably with Burnt Sienna paint.  Notice how the levels of dilution and hence the intensity and value of the brown color vary within the reflection.   It has also changed hue from brown to an orange as would happen to Burnt Sienna when diluted.  Also notice that some of the pigment has migrated to the periphery of the area leaving a slightly darker outline.   Above the rower the brown has “feathered.”

Many of the earth colors dilute out to another hue.  Raw Sienna begins as a brown but dilutes to yellow, Burnt Sienna goes from brown to orange,  Burnt Umber also tends to get more red-orange as it is diluted.

The effect of using watercolor in this way would be difficult to do in oils because brush stokes would show and it would be extremely difficult to even think up all the subtle transitions let alone actually paint it. ( I should mention that, if you dilute acrylic paint to water color viscosity, you can sometimes make a painting that can’t be told from watercolor.)  You can’t do this is oil because the oil dries so slowly.

It is traditional to discuss at this point the stages of wetness of the paper and the stages of viscosity of the paint and sometimes the amount of water in the brush.  I think it’s better to focus on the marks themselves that result from these variables. Rather than thinking about how wet the paper is and how fluid the paint is, think about what sort of mark or passage you want to make.

There are two ways to go about getting the right sort of transparent watercolor mark or wash.  The first is to work with varying degrees of wet paper.  The second, which I recommend to less advance and experienced artists, is to always work  after your first wash on dry paper which can be accomplished quickly in the studio with a hair dryer, or you can wait for it to dry.  James Fletcher-Watson, when painting out of doors,  sometimes used to  time the wait by smoking half a pipe between washes.

I’m dividing the marks into those you don’t want to make and those that you do want to make.

No-No’s, marks you do not want to make

You want to think about and look for these mistakes to correct them if you can.

backwashes

These occur when the viscosity of the paint in the brush is greater than the wetness of the paper.  The worst occur when the paper looks dry to the eye but is actually damp,  It is natural at this stage for the wetter paint to spread out into the damp paper. That’s why I suggest you work with absolutely dry paper in the beginning.

You must put down one wash or mark and, as soon as it gets the slightest bit dry, leave it alone.  If you missed filling in the area of the pencil mark you have made, it often doesn’t matter.

Once this backwash happens there is nothing you can do about it except wait for it to completely dry and hide it with another wash.   But this better than trying to fix it. Occasionally it doesn’t look so bad in a small patch and can be left alone.  Naturally there are some artists who let this happen in a controlled way, but I don’t recommend you trying it.

bronzing

Paint out of the tube is very thick, so that, when it dries, it is not at all transparent and forms a “scab.”  It has absolutely no transparency or variability.  It might be good for a headlight or tail light of a car, but in general it is a bad idea.  It looks like gouache (body color). You can wet it and blot it sometimes or scrub it with a “scrub brush” used for stenciling  and return the wash to a degree of transparency.  You tend to get this when you try for a deep dark passage.

boring flat passages

Even if you put in a transparent mark, if it is too large, it will be boring. After it dries you can put some clean water down and blot it to create some variability.  If you notice it in time and it is still very wet, you can drop some other color into it in a wet-in-wet fashion.  You can spray it with a spray bottle also.

no sparkles of white

Usually, when you are putting down a wash, if you do not go back and forth over the area, that is run your brush from one side to the other and  back again, there will be some small areas of the paper that do not connect with the brush and stay white.  This is a positive thing at least since Winslow Homer did it.  You should try to make this happen.  Of course, it’s easier with rough paper, and on rough paper you can use a wetter brush load.

THE ONE WAY RULE: Use the biggest brush you can for what you are doing.  PUT YOUR BRUSH DOWN ONLY ONCE AND DO NOT GO BACK OVER THE STROKE.  It’s a one way street.  MAKE THE STROKE DEFINITIVE AND FAST WITH THE BELLY  OF THE BRUSH ON THE PAPER.  HOLD THE BRUSH TOWARD THE BACK END (AWAY FROM THE HAIRS).  (except for very detailed work) NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK OF THE MARK YOU HAVE MADE. WAIT FOR IT TO DRY BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING.

not using the belly of the brush

You want to work with the full brush not like with the tip of a pencil.  You put the brush down so that the belly of the brush touches the paper.  Also try to hold the brush as far up the handle as you feel is comfortable for you.  This is so you do not make a tight line and introduce a little uncertainty into your stroke.

being a “tube painter”

A tube painter never mixes his or her colors but always uses paint right out of the tube.  Unfortunately, when you look at a painting like this, you think, not “that’s a nice painting”, but “that’s Cobalt Blue and Viridian, and there’s Payne’s gray again!” and “Oh, look over there.  The painter has bought some Opera.”  If you watch videos of well know watercolorists, you won’t learn much because the camera person just videos them painting, but you will notice that they dip their brush into several paints almost all the time.  If you have a show and use tube paints exclusively, all the pictures will look the same.

Yes, yes:  Marks you do want to make

Joseph Zbukvic is adamant about working on a slant with a wash that has a “bead” at the bottom (without the slant there wouldn’t be a bead). This sort of wash has to have enough water in it to pool along the bottom line where the wash meets dry paper.  You pick up the wash by first dragging a new brushful over the bead so that it doesn’t leave a line.   He believes that in the bead is where all the good things happen although the only thing I’ve found that he specifically says is that granulation happens there, the precipitation of darker pigment specks (only with some paints.)

In any event, it is important to become a connoisseur of different watery ways that watercolor washes can look.  Basically you do not want a consistent looking wash like the classical wash that is always taught at the onset of old fashioned watercolor instruction or even the so-called graded wash.

Some marks to try to make

dry brush.

You use the side of a relatively dry brush, blotted on paper  (see below for brush wetness), and make a fast stroke going only one way hoping that only the tops of the hills in the texture of the paper will be painted.  Obviously rough paper is easy to use for this.

scratching out

You can use your nail, a credit card, or a pocket knife on wet paper to make either a dark mark (on very wet paper) good for indicating boards on the side of a house, for example, or (on a less wet paper) a light mark good for indicating blade of grass.  It takes some practice to know exactly  how much to delay and let the paint get a little less wet to get a white mark.  If you want a dark mark, you can do it right away , but if you are gentle with your scratch, you can try again and again until you can see that you’re going to get a light mark without leaving a dark one.

Sometimes a razor  or the tip of a sharp knife is use to actually scratch the dry paper to make a white line.

If you use a stylus or a ball point pen without ink, you can write your name on dry, unpainted paper so that there is an indentation in the paper, cover it with paint, and wipe it dry.  Paint will stay in the indentations made by the stylus, and your signature will appear in whatever color you use to paint over the indentations and wipe away.

wet-in-wet, charging the wash with another color

If both paints are of the same degree of wetness they will mingle but still maintain the form.  It’s often called “charging” the wash with another color.  If you can do it warm and cool, there is a nice “counterchange” with what is sometimes called a “vibration” between the colors.

Marks having to do with edges

As most people know there are hard edges and soft edges.  If you work with absolutely dry paper, you get hard edges, but you can make a soft edge by running a brush damped with clear water along the edge to soften it.  When someone is more experienced, he or she can judge the wetness of the paper and the viscosity of the paint to be able to put down a mark that will have soft edges, but this is hard to do, so I recommend starting with modifying a hard-edged mark on dry paper by brushing it will a damp brush.

If you are making a multiple stroke passage, as much as possible put enough paint on the paper to have a bead of water at the lower end of your wash.  When you refill your brush with water and/or paint, you start with the first stroke along the bead, picking it up.

more advanced marks

There are some edges one sees only in watercolor which are soft but have spread out slightly.  These have to be made on wet paper and are tough to do.  The basic idea is to have the thickness of the paint matched to the wetness of the paper.  The drier the paper the thicker(drier) the paint.  This is because paper that is not completely dry is very thirsty for more water and will suck up the what water it can from your brush mark, and this will spread out.

 paper wetness

Generally you can divided the wetness of the paper into the follow divisions, although it is a continuum from flooded to completely dry.

 1. You can notice that, after the flooded stage, there is a stage in which there are a lot of reflections because some of the water that was put on is still in the valleys of the paper but the hills are less wet and reflect light.

2. Next there is a stage when the paper looks dull and wet, no reflections.

 3. Next there is a stage when the paper looks dry but it is cool and damp.  This is the most dangerous stage because it is the thirstiest and any mark you make with paint that is the slightest bit viscous, that is not what is called “stiff” in its consistency, will blossom into a big area.

One way to check on the wetness of the paper is to touch it.  It will feel cool even if it doesn’t look wet.  It is usually recommend to use the back of your hand so you do not get skin oil on the paper which will repel water.  You can also check the back of the paper because the water can go all the way through.  Bruce McEvoy thinks you can also smell the wetness of paper that looks dry.

The wetness of the paint (it’s viscosity)

YOU MUST ACTIVATE YOUR PAINTS.  THEY CANNOT BE DRY BRICKS IN YOUR PANS THAT YOU SCRUB  TO GET PAINT ON YOUR BRUSH.  IF YOU SCRUB TO GET PAINT, YOU ARE USING VERY DILUTE PAINT, THE VISCOSITY OF TEA, ALL THE TIME.

The goal is to vary the viscosity of the paint.  You do this in order to get counterchange in your composition:  dark versus light, cool versus warm, and intense high chroma paint versus grayed down paint.  This variation is , perhaps, the single most significant characteristic of paintings that separates the professionals from the amateurs.

TO ACHIEVE THIS VARIABILITY (COUNTERCHANGE) YOU MUST BE ABLE TO STICK THE TIP OF A BRUSH INTO THE PAINT WITHOUT THE TIP BENDING.  (Scrubbing will wear the tip off your brushes.)   If you paint frequently, you can squirt some water into your palette from a eye dropper daily or more even when you are not painting.  That way the paint does not get bone dry.  If not, you have to give the paint some time to become liquid again, count on a half an hour from squirting water to painting.

The various viscosities of paint.

The viscosity of the paint will determine how it will flow.  The problem is finding your own way of judging this ability to flow.  I have two ways below.

One way to judge viscosity of paint  (but see next section for a more realistic way)

Very wet paint is the consistency of tea and cannot hold enough pigment to have a high chroma, intensity of color.  It’s often used in the sky and in the distance.

Other distinctions of the wetness of paint, which of course is actually a continuum,  have been described by matching them to the consistency of well know fluids like coffee, milk, cream, and butter.  Butter is the consistency of paint just out of the tube and has very little use.

Different paint viscosities will start to flow down a tilted palette at different degrees of tilt and drip off the brush at different speeds. But I personally do not find this flow or drip test useful. Although viscosity, in fact, is often measured by how fast a fluid flows through a small hole in the bottom of a cup.

The two most important distinctions are between the thicker paint, a “creamy” drop, and  a “thinner” drop, a milky drop.  A drop of paint that has not started to flow down a tilted palette will  have a different look depending on its viscosity.  I find I can easily see that a creamy drop of paint  on a tilted palette  keep sit’s round look whereas a milky drop will bulge on the lower side getting ready, so to speak, to break loose and flow down the palette.  What I find the best test is, when you gently shake the palette from side to side,  a creamy drop will not respond whereas a milky drop will wiggle.

another way to judge the viscosity of your paint

Actually it’s a minority of watercolor books that discuss the viscosity of paint as I have done above.  Most just don’t mention it.

They don’t mention the way I’m about to describe either e, but another way is to have a scrap of watercolor paper to try your wash out first.

Let’s go through the process of getting paint on the brush.

• 1. You first dip the brush in water,
• 2.  you shake off a drop,
• 3. you dip the brush in the paint, and
• 4.you smear what you have on the brush on the palette.  (Do not skip this last step).
• When you get more experienced, by looking at what you have on the palette you can determine the viscosity of the paint.

 I am suggesting a fifth stage: Make a mark with the paint on a piece of scrap paper.

 You will get an idea of how “stiff”,how viscose, the paint is by its color because water dilutes the paint and makes it lighter in value and weaker in intensity (In some earth colors it changes the hue as well).   Below is some Raw Sienna with different amounts of water in it.  I think it’s pretty easy to see differences.   And really what you are after is what it looks like on the paper not its viscosity.  I was recently watching a video of James Fletcher-Watson in his studio and noticed that he checked his paint on a scrap of paper very often.  (Of course, there was no discussion.  In most videos there is just the camera man and the artist  working away who is concentrating too hard to say much.)  I think as you do this more, you can begin to know how the paint is going to look before you make a mark with it.  Then you will find you are judging it by the viscosity of the paint, but that comes much later.

JUICY 

The interesting thing for me is that, although there is all this talk about how to describe the viscosity of the paint (tea, milk, cream, etc) when a mark is put down that someone really likes he or she is more likely to refer to it as “juicy”.   What does that mean?  I can only guess because I am inclined to use the term “juicy” to myself also.  Well, first of all it is wet, that is it is a puddle of paint over the entire mark not like the above marks although the top of the mark on the right is close to it.  That mark falls short of juicy for me because the entire mark is not as wet as the top.   The goal here is to make the mark as wet as it can be without running.  You do not “paint” the area of the paper on which you are working, that is getting enough paint on the area to color it as you would when painting a wall or ceiling, you drizzle paint on it leaving a puddle.  This requires having a pretty big reservoir of paint on your palette (probably in a deep cup like indentation not on a flat surface which would be better for “stiff” paint.)

 Secondly, juicy marks have intense, transparent color.  In this case the  top of the mark second from the left is more like what juicy means than the last mark on the right  which is not transparent.

If you ever get to see really good Asian ink drawing, for example in scrolls, you will see fantastic brushwork which requires essentially “juicy” washes.

the water in the brush

1.  It is important to fill your water container high enough so you can see how far you have dipped your brush into it.  That way you can determine the amount of water that it takes up.

2. Almost everyone shakes the first drop off  the brush either by flicking the brush and getting drops all over the floor or blotting it on paper.   Sometimes on a roll of toilet paper is used with the cardboard tube removed and squashed down a bit.

3. You also can take water out of a brush by blotting it with paper at the base of the hairs where they meet the metal ferrule or heel of the brush.

The take-home message is, in the beginning, to work on dry paper and use a piece of scrap to check the strength of the paint (the viscosity) in your brush.

Here’s a tour-de-force by Aubrey Phillips working with wet paper and washes just viscous enough to create a clear form but with blurry edges.  For me this is the most successful of his paintings in this fashion.  You will have to click on it one or two times to get an enlargement that gives you a good idea of what it is like.

Aubrey Phillips (click on it to get enlargement)

E. Tiemens (oil)  Angel Island

The best sky painter since Constable is Eric Tiemems who lives, I think, in Marin Country, California.  He usually uses watercolor and gouache  although the one above is a very small oil.  His blog is here.   What is interesting is that he often tells you what artist he was thinking about when he did a sketch — something I mention in this series in terms of encouraging you to recognizing what the “problem” is with which you are dealing and how other artist have dealt with it.   The secret to his success is complexity. He let’s one sky wash dry and then put down another, probably later in the painting, and  then repeats it again and again.  Here’s the sky part of one in watercolor.

————————————————————————————–

Instead of completing a painting a day as all the other courses I know of do, we are going to break up the process so that we bring all of paintings to completion as the course goes on.  As I have pointed out, most of these paintings will be the same motif because this is an exercise and repetition will lead to better technique.

Basically what we are going to do on the first day is lay down the first wash(s) that covers the paper, the “foundation wash”.  We are going to lay it down in one fell swoop and leave it alone.  We will either talk while it dries or start another, and another, and another getting more complicated as we go along.

We are going to use all these sheets in the following days for the next step in the paintings beyond the foundation wash.

If your curious, we’ll more or less follow Ian  King’s seven stages of a panting (see reference in previous post), combining a few to fit the course time.

The basic rule is you start with what is furthest from you in space and highest on your paper (the sky usually) and work toward you and down to the immediate foreground.  

Ina King’s stages are:

1. sky
2. background
3. foreground
4. main subject
5. trees  (I’m adding water, buildings)
6. details  (figures, animals, lampposts, fences, brick & stone walls etc.)
7. shadows

Joseph Zbukvic says essentially the same thing in terms of stages but in a more general and powerful way:

• “Most of my paintings are done in three stages.  I apply the major ground wash first to establish the principal shapes or earth and sky.  Then the second wash establishes all the shapes placed on the ground.  The third stage is the addition of detail.  If you keep the process simple you are more likely to succeed. “

The mistake both systems are avoiding is to color in-between the lines of your drawing like a coloring book.  Because watercolor is transparent you can go over it.  For example you can bring a sky wash all the way down to the bottom of your paper and then add the distant mountains on the horizon and the ground plane over it.  What you get is a more unified painting.   It is interesting  is you can go outside of the lines of your drawing without creating any trouble in this system.

an exception to the above

There is one notable watercolorist, John Yardley, who does not follow this approach.  For example, he leaves the sky for last.  He attributes this to being in a hurry to get to the main subject when he was young.  Anyway, although he starts in the distance, he tends to paint each individual object in his painting in the order that strikes his fancy.  For example, he will paint a piano before he paints the floor on which it sits.  But what this really achieves is preserving a vignette -ing white around whatever he wants.  The the floor being painted after the piano can be done in such a way that there are whites around parts of the piano.   This is easier than, while painting the floor first, trying to figure out where the whites should be.    I should also mention that he lets most areas of the painting, e.g. the piano, dry completely before coming near it with any other paint.  His paint is very strong, “juice-y” as he says. He does occasionally allow two side by side passages to merge to get soft edges or soften an edge with plain water, but interestingly he doesn’t do wet-in-wet.  He prefers “side-by-side”.

We may try one painting like he works at the end, but his work depends upon a very good drawing and very good composition, something that I have decided not to presume students have in designing this course.  In fact Yardley started as a draftsman who was afraid to put watercolor on his work for fear of spoiling it!  His drawings are no longer detailed, but they are still very accurate and the composition excellent.

I really like is book which is available secondhand here.

the importance of having an exercise

When you are learning a skill, it is important to be able to have something you can practice whenever you want and whenever you have some spare moment.  In the case of watercolor that means not having to go out and find a landscape or stay in and find a model or still life.  This is one of those exercises.  When you have a few minutes and some scrap paper, you can try laying in a sky and then embellishing the landscape as we do here.

I really can’t emphasize this enough.  If you want to paint like Winslow Homer, you can, of course, copy his work, but eventually you will be able to find an exercise that will abstract the necessary skills to paint somewhat like he did.

before getting to the classroom 

Everyday begins with activating your paints Preferably before you get to class.  You do not want to scrub the dry paints to get some paint on your brush or you will wear your brushes down quickly and you won’t get enough paint to make a “juicy” wash. I use an eye dropper.    It can take a half an hour if you want to get the paints to the point that you can dip the point of your brush in them, but even ten minutes makes a difference.

On the other hand, some professionals top off what’s left in the palette with tube paint when they are ready to paint and that really would be the best, but you have to judge how much you are going to use or you are going to waste a lot of paint.

After you activate your paints at home if you can hold your palette flat as you transport it, it’s helpful because you can activate the paint way ahead of time.  There are bags specifically for transporting watercolor gear that allow for this by having a flat bottom.  Here’s one:

the pencil marks

Before we put in the washes, we are going to make a pencil mark for the horizon and for a few primitive shapes we are going to not paint at all, leaving them dry paper in what is called “reserving the white”.   In any watercolor you are going to make, you have to first do a drawing no matter how little and second figure out where you are not going to paint.

Everyone has a favorite type of pencil, but in this case it is important not to make an indentation in the paper with a very hard pencil.  The indentation will have pooled paint in it and it is hard to erase.  Most people use a pencil on the B side of the spectrum like a 2B.  Even so, you want to go lightly so that you can erase without tearing up the paper because it will become a blotter.  As far as erasers go, you can’t use the red erasers  on the end of ordinary pencils.  They simply don’t work.  The white erasers are the best.  Here’s a link to a discussion of erasers here.

The first line is the horizon or eye line.  We will talk a bit about where to place it and whether to use one pencil mark across the whole picture or break it up as well as what type of pencil you prefer (pencil marks are allowed to show in watercolor:  Winslow Homer used them for boat rigging for example.  They also erase completely after washes are put in.)  Of course there are times when you do not want a distinct horizon line.

Then we make a square  (which we are going to reserve the white on/in) sitting on the horizon for the front of a building with the light hitting it or, perhaps, draw in the whole building in the simplest way, but the rest of the building will be covered with washes.  This is a John Hoar idea.

Then a few shapes for rocks in the foreground will be reserved on the other side from the house which we will also leave dry so we have to delineate them.

Over the course of the day we will place these form around the paper so that we have to be alert to them to keep them untouched.  It’s harder than you think to see where you are going as you are quickly making a wash with a big brush.  It’s difficult to keep track  and avoid a shape which you will only see out of the corner of your eye.  If you do your wash slow enough, you can put a penciled “W” for white which you might see and remember in more complicated paintings.

the first (in this case) sky wash

fragment Edward Wesson sky

In a general way it’s a good practice at the outset to run one or two half-washes over the entire sheet of paper on which you are working whether there a sky in the picture or not. Usually one strives for the dominant mid-tone (not hue) “reserving the white” of the paper in some places.  This was the procedure made popular by  Carolus-Duran (in oil) whose pupil, John Singer Sargent also used and taught it to his students.  Carolus-Duran, who was French, called it the “demi-teinte generale .”

Once that was established and the first wash(es) are completely dry,  it makes it easier for you to figure  how small the variations from this first wash are  needed to pin down the other values to get “absolute tonal precision”.  You can’t actual reproduce the values in nature because the range is far greater than the range of values possible with paint.   But you can make the values relatively to each other the same as in nature, and that seems sufficient for the viewer to feel the painting represents the scene.  This is probably because we can only make relative judgements about value.  In other words the sky look light although it is no where as light as a real sky.

You work up and down in tone from these initial washes.  However, you only have one more washes that can go over your initial wash, one free over wash.  After that you will lift the color from the bottom wash and things will get muddy.  You can, of course, lift off places in your washes where you want to go up in value (lighter).  This is an important difference between a good watercolor and one that look amateurish.

Sometimes you might want to run the sky wash, particularly if it is gray, all the way down your paper to have a unifying wash under everything else which might be slightly damp softening edges.  Sometimes a term from oil painting is applied to this called “painting into the soup”  as James Fletcher-Watson called it, the soup in this case being the first overall wash perhaps still slightly damp.  It’s somewhat inaccurate since “painting into the soup” was the derogatory term impressionist used for the classical oil technique of having a lot of medium on the canvas with an unsaturated hue, a “dead” color, into which one painted.  One’s brush moved very smoothly in this “soup”.

The sky wash is our “first wash” although it will be a little too light to please Carolus-Duran.  If we were planning a very busy foreground we would have a simple sky and visa versa.

• Also, I don’t know where this fits in, but you shouldn’t look at the sky for too long or your tonal judgement will be thrown off.  You are looking at the light source sort of like looking at a light fixture, and your pupils are going to contract and your retina is going to get washed out.  The same is probably true of hues as well.  The longer you look the more the visual system is going to simplify and lump things together.  Your first glance is your best reference.

Nothing can be more important than this wash.  A good sky makes a painting, yet it requires very little from you.  The watercolor “paints itself “is the way it’s said.  In the extreme this is a type of watercolor technique called “experimental watercolor.”  Nita Engle is the master of this.  See here for her book.  There are many derivative UTube videos.  Just Google “experimental watercolor” if you’re interested.  The basic idea is an extreme controlled wash.  The paper is literally flooded with water.  This means that it has to be stretched tight as a drum with stables and glued tape.  It works well with full sheets  of paper, but with, say, half imperial size paper a less extreme method like the one proposed here does not require preparation.

It’s like a lot of things in life:  you can’t make it happen, but you can set up the context that allows it to happen.  The more you try to make it happen under voluntary control, the less it will happen. A lot of bodily functions work this way, for example sleep.  You do not consciously will yourself to sleep like turning off a switch, but you set the stage and it happens.  So just like falling sleep is essential and you can clutch up trying to sleep and fail to do so, so are controlled washes (as Trevor Chamberlain calls them) you can tighten up and not be able to let them happen.

Above all we are going to try to avoid a formulaic sky.  Your sky, although a controlled wash, should be inspired by a real sky that you’re seeing or have seen.

The process we are going to use for the first sky wash is typical of modern English impressionists.  First we slosh on some clear water, skipping areas of the sky which we leave dry.  When we then put in the first wash, the paint in the wet part is soft edged and where the brush goes over the dry paper there are hard edges.  Some of the white is left white (reserved).  Well start with a blue sky in parts and then wash in another color which as been described as a peachy color or sometimes a milky red.  It is made by mixing raw sienna and English red.  So some of the sky is going to be blue, part of the clouds are going to be this peachy color with some white reserved.

Below is a hasty example.  It’s crude as all first washes can be.  It probably took about 30 seconds to compete.  I put in the foreground (raw sienna, which is transparent, in the back and yellow ochre, which is more opaque and has more intensity, in the front) because it’s hard to judge with white paper below it.  There will be a “background” on the horizon on both sides of the house (for example, a row of low blue mountains, but that’s for another day when we do that.  We will have to make a house out of the square, but by running the sky all around the house we assure ourselves that the rest of the house will be in the shade. (I forgot to put in some reserved areas for rocks in the front in my haste to just get something quickly done.)  I let the sky color come down over the horizon in case we want to have some water in the distance.  It’s sometimes good to run the sky color all the way down because  it integrates the picture.   You can see that the paper “cockled” that is got wavy a bit, but when dry it will straighten out.

here’s what it looks like wet. It will dry lighter

I wanted to show it to you wet and dry, so you get an idea of how much lighter a wash becomes.  Will keep doing this sort of thing varying the colors.  We can make a gray sky with just a little blue showing through, etc.  But I am not going to go through all of that here.  Not all of them will be “keepers” and this one might not be, but you cannot tell until you have put more into the picture.

here is is dry and flat but still a little too much chroma in the photot:

here it is with the house drawn in:

and here it is with the roof painted, the background put in, and some trees around the house to give you an idea of how the whole picture develops in other sessions and where we are going. I don’t know how the camera foreground got so dark.  It’s really the same color as the above pictures.

Actually I think it says something of value.  The camera expects high chroma  (intensity)  c0lors and programs it.  The beauty of watercolors of this sort is that we have subtler shades and colors that more reflect the real world.  So we can complete with the camera in this way.  If people want a snapshot of a beautiful scene they should use a camera, but they want a beautiful painting, they should make a watercolor.

Now what we’ll do is tack everyone first effort on a wall and talk about it and what we might do differently.

Check these Winslow Homer skies by clicking on them:

The last one shows some Japanese woodblock influence with the dark band across the top.

FINAL COUPLE OF PAINTINGS

For a change we are going to reverse the sky-foreground proportion and have a small insignificant one color sky, a small house on the eye line, and a huge foreground.  Instead of white clouds we are going to have white patches of snow and instead of gray or peachy clouds we are going to have green, brown and yellow grasses.  We will use the same technique of partially  flooding the paper.  We will have more washes over washes after letting each one dry than in a sky.   Will scrape out some grass and fiddle with it a lot.  We have to make it interesting with some hard edges, some soft edges, and some ghostly washes.  What we are going to wind up with is a painting like Philip Jameson or Wyeth.

This is it for my description of the first day.  It’s doable don’t you think?  If enough interest is shown, I’ll continue with some more “days.”

In another post  here I discuss the problem of finding something to paint.  This exercise by-passes this problem.  If you can’t think of anything to paint, try just doing this sky, land, house.  It will get you going and improve your skills that are not really associated with finding something to paint, but with mixing colors, laying down different kinds of washes, etc.  As you’re doing it, you think of lots of variations like foreground flowers, may some figures or animals.  It all will depend on how well you can draw at this stage, but there is always something that’ll come to you.  And, this is the point, it will save you all that time trying to find a motif.  Of course, if you have lots of time, why not scout out subjects, but “making something out of nothing” is the essence of the art.

x

on English Impressionist Watercolor Landscapes

English impressionist watercolor artists focus on capturing the light and simplifying shapes.  They  “indicate” but do not “state”.  They let the viewer put the details into the painting.  For a  review of some modern masters see here:

I think there has to be two phases of instruction:  the first is about making a basic watercolor and the second (to come later) is about making a more atmospheric one of mostly “controlled” washes.

The problem with people who sell equipment for watercolorists and the people who teach courses for watercolorists is that they try to modify oil painting equipment (hence pochade boxes instead of tin palettes) and courses in oil painting studios where the only water that is going to be used is at the end of the session to clean the brushes.  This post attempts to change that approach at least theoretically.

the rationale

Developing the skills to be proficient in watercolor is no different from developing skills in music or sports.  It requires breaking down complex skills into their component parts and practicing them in a repeated, disciplined way that allows you to see when you get it right and when you don’t.  The problem with doing so in watercolor is that there are no notions of how to practice in this way. This course suggests a way for doing so.

Why anyone thinks he or she can become moderately good at watercolor without a lot of practice is beyond me. Just as a pianist works on  “Hanon exercises”, 60 such exercises “for the acquirement of Agility, Independence, Strength, and Perfect Evenness”, in this course a way of doing so in watercolor is demonstrated for somewhat the same goals.  However, this exercise is much easier than Hanon exercises and suitable for a beginner as well as someone more advanced who would like develop a discipline practice.

In fact, advanced artists practice all the time.   That’s what “sketches” are.  Many watercolorists, for example, when they haven’t anything in mind to paint, will grab a piece of paper and sketch in a sky or a tree to “warm up.”

I have a whole post on the subject of practice here.

overview

We work over and over again with an all-purpose simple scene which has everything one is likely to encounter in a landscape: a sky, a house, some trees, rocks and bushes (and later some figures, water. etc) .  It is similar to a scene painted by John Hoar in his first video.

The scene can fall into the category, often mentioned by watercolorist, of “making something out of nothing.”   Camille Pissarro wrote in 1893, :”Blessed are they that see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”  That’s what we want to do.

This “making something out of nothing” is an important added benefit as we focus on making the washes the way we want them, the composition, etc without trying for a dazzling center of interest.  It’s an important change of attitude toward art making particularly suited to watercolors.

In other words: It’s how we paint not what we paint.

the camera makes the foreground to much like the clouds

But the main point is that it is possible to practice it at home with infinite variations until our mental and manual skills begin to shape up.  The very simplicity of the scene is instructive in itself since simplifying naturally complex landscapes is one of the goals of this kind of art-making.  Although the scene itself is simple there are many decisions and judgments at each step, really too many to improvise as one goes along, which we shall discuss in this course as they come up, for example where to place the horizon line or the size of the house and the adage that you never put a tree in a painting without its having some work to do.  Repeated exercise helps these thoughts to pop up automatically as you paint.

One of the advantages of the scene we use is that it doesn’t require any expertise in drawing, which is ultimately essential to more complex landscapes, but by sidestepping drawing, the emphasis can be placed on compositional decisions and paint handling techniques.  This is the reason that we are not using a Winslow Homer painting as a starting point.  His work always has a beautifully drawn center of interest behind which is a loose, abstract watercolor.  This center of interest drawing would both require too much time to really do well and require advanced drawing skills.

We also do not soak the paper beforehand and mount it to a support with tape, so that reduces the time needed for preparation because we are going to use a lot of paper.  Since nothing of what we produce is going to be hung, we can stick pushpins in it, tape it down, staple it to a board — whatever we want.

The physical setup of the classroom

There would be four essential requirements specific to watercolor besides, of course, the usual individual tables, good light, etc.  This equipment in many ways takes the place of an exotic locale in which to try to learn watercolor:

1. an overhead demonstration mirror at the front.

I will paint along with you and make comments as I go along.

2.  an outlet at every table for a hair drier.

Washes must be absolutely dry before another one is put over it, so there are pauses for this to happen.  This is good because demonstrations and crits can take place during these periods but, it is essential to speed this process up at times because drying time varies with the weather, and that’s what the drier is for.

3.  Adequate water supply.

Art studios and classrooms often have the water supply pretty far away, watercolorists have to be able to refresh their water often and conveniently not trudge upstairs to the bathroom.

I’ve been thinking that a chemistry lab in a school might be a better place for watercolor than an art studio!

4.  A means of showing sample watercolors from seminal watercolorists in high definition such as a computer, projector, and screen.

materials for the student to bring

You will need a lot of good watercolor paper.  Bring anything you have, but, if you’re going to buy paper,  Bockingford  140 lb (white not tinted) is probably the cheapest to start with.  It is a wood chip based paper and perfectly acceptable to watercolorists (neutral pH and archival).  It doesn’t absorb paint as fast as cotton fiber paint (there isn’t any linen fiber paper left), and this can be an advantage.  Your washes stay on top longer and you can scrub passages off easier than with cotton based paper.  If you’re going to buy  paper, buy it in imperial sheet size and for some of the sheets, cut or  fold it a few times and tear it into quarters.  It’s a good idea to have both rough and cold press (called”not”  in England) and maybe some slightly warm tinted paper (“oatmeal” color.)  If you buy imperial sheets, you can probably mix and match.

Bring the biggest and best brushes you can afford particularly as you work on progressively larger paper sizes   (Rosemary’s Brushes in England has the best buys and will send them to the US.  It may take two weeks to get them.), a scrub brush (like those for stencils), a palette with deep wells for wet washes (e.g. plastic “muffin tins” palettes) and some flat surfaces for stiffer paint, and a minimum number of artist grade watercolor paints.

Every watercolor artist of renown suggests some sort of brush.  Neville Chamberlain uses a shaving brush!  Edward Wesson made popular the mob brush which used to be used for French varnishing until he made it popular.   I don’t think the brush will make you a painter.   I use a mop brush, a large pointing filbert (which can be used flat, on its side, and with its point),  and a rigger or, better still, a dagger liner.  The latter two brushes I picked the idea up from John Hoar.

On the left is a sword liner, then a mop, and finally a pointing filbert (all from Rosemary’s Brushes).

For paints I would suggest a “multiple primary palette”:  all the yellows , all the reds, and all the blues you have hanging around  and burnt umber (as a convenience in mixing grays).  We will mix the secondaries (e.g. green) and tertiary colors.

Earth colors are best for  our purposes because, when they are in washes of varying amounts of water, they suggest varying states of the light.    Watercolor is unsurpassed at rendering the nuances of atmosphere and the changes effect in local color by the intervening air.   For example, if you get raw sienna get one that does not have an ordinary yellow pigment mixed in with it.  If you do, when you make a long mark the hue will change from the sienna yellow to the yellow that’s been added, and there won’t be that lovely change in value that are associated with changing atmospheric conditions, atmospheric perspective, subtle reflected light, etc.  Of course, you will eventually want to keep some “eye candy” type paints “up your sleeve (as Tevor Chamberlain said) with high saturation colors like Winslow Homer’s use of vermillion, but this is a frill.

If you don’t have any paints at all:

get the following yellows:  raw sienna, cadmium or arylide yellow,  and yellow ochre.

the following blues:  ultramarine blue, pthalo blue RS (rs= “red shade”), and cobalt blue

The following reds:  burnt sienna, light red (Winsor Newton) or Indian Red, or another earth red.

and burnt umber.  While you’re at it, thrown in some Payne’s gray for cloudy skies.

You will need a cheap hair drier so we don’t have to wait forever for a wash to dry.

You need some paper towels and/or a toilet paper roll with the cardboard tube removed to blot your brushes.

The textbook for the class is Ian King’s Watercolour Tips available on Amazon

here.  He really was an art teacher and it shows in his approach.

If you need a palette i suggest looking at this one at Ken Bromley (also English)  here.

You’ll need a pencil (there are mixed opinions about whether it should be 6B or HB), a “real” eraser such as a Pilot foam eraser, and a hand-held pencil sharpener such as the Kum long point (which has two holes, one to shave the wood and another to sharpen the lead.  Much better than anything else.

See here for the next installment.

As a rule someone who has difficult with painting in any medium is not prepared to believe that the real trouble is ignorance of drawing and composition.  (William Herring)

A well-composed painting is half done. (Bonnard)

Looking for something to paint

The composition problem begins with finding something to paint.  A landscape painter carries equipment outside and, if not careful, can wind up wandering around taking a long time trying to find something worth painting.   This is a classical mistake that many of us have made:  tiring ourselves out before we even begin painting, lugging heavy equipment around, looking for the perfect motif when, in fact, there are no paintings out there.  We are acting like tourists not artists. Paintings  are “constructed.” They are in our heads.

What I mean by paintings are all in our head is that the task of finding something to paint is often misinterpreted to mean finding a subject or object of significance to the imagined viewer of the finished painting, perhaps a boat, a bird, or even a group of figures.  Worse, well meaning friends will point out “interesting” subjects, but they are interesting in the wrong way.

I recently saw a suite of photographs from a safari in Africa.  Most of them were of animals:  a snake crossing the road, a lion yawning, etc.  But a few were “scenes” that one could paint.  One, for example, that caught my eye was of an elephant ambling down the road away from the camera.  (It’s not because of the classical compositional cliche of the road “entering the picture” as I ranted about in the first post on composition.)   The point is it isn’t just a picture of an object or animal.

Contrast the above photo with this one:

One way to understand in what way something pointed out to us as interesting is wrong for a painting is to consider how John Singer Sargent was taught.  He was taught painting by Carolus-Duran in a group setting.  Carolus_Duran would have the group march around the studio and stop at a certain random point, much like musical chairs, and then paint what ever was before them.  This stood Sargent in good stead often.   When delayed while traveling, he would take his painting equipment, just march off a few paces, and begin to paint what was before him.  Carolus-Duran understood that the “painting” is not out there to find.  One constructs it.

What Sargent was taught to look for by this musical chairs exercise was four things:

1.   Large interesting shapes

2.  Sharp contrasts of value

3.  Sharp contrasts of color intensity: jewel like sparkle of a hue (high intensity) against grayed flat hues.

4. Sharp contracts of warm and cool colors of the same or close hues often described as “vibrating” and often in multiple small passages.

It is not the thing you are painting that makes a work of art but how well you design and paint it.  Someone may commission you to paint her new swimming pool (as happened to a friend of mine) and think in terms of the object alone, but in all likelihood she will not like the resulting painting unless you think in different terms than she does – in terms of the design

  I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things;

         to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings. (Balthus)

As far as I know only John Singer Sargent ever gave a name to what this something else is called.  He called it “the effect”.   This is an edge in which there is a strong contrast that draws the eye.  For example, he often found a strong value contrast in portraits between the side of the nose and the eye.  It draws the viewer’s eye.

However, There are three aspects of contrast in the subject for which we must look:

Value (light against dark)

Intensity (rich color against grayed color)

Warm against cool

First, let’s look at shapes

 It’s best to look for large forms.  One way to do this is to zoom in, to start the painting 30 feet from where you are.  This was Corot’s advice, I believe.

Once you have some forms in mind, they have to be arranged.  One of the most general and best rules is that there should be no even intervals of objects (and, values, hues, etc. which we will discuss below.)    This means that you must move things, change their size so that there are uneven intervals. Usually there should be considerably more of one size shape than the other.   Greg Albert in the book  The Simple Secret to Better Painting: How to Immediately Improve Your Work with the One Rule of Composition (May 7, 2003) put it this way:  the distribution of shapes should be “mostly, some, and a little bit”of big, medium, and small shapes.  The same distribution should occur with the intervals between them.

This means, of course, that one must take some artistic license to modify what is before you to make a good painting, a good composition. It also means that you can turn around and add something that isn’t in the view right in front of you.  It’s called “Stealing” by some people.

Some degree of exaggeration and simplification is allowable and often necessary.

Avoiding a “pasted on “ look

 This is very important, but there’s not much to say.  Shapes must be connected to each other or the background otherwise they look like they are pasted on.   The easiest way to do this is to connect the shadows.  You can also lose edges to make a shape blend into the background or have some overlap.  Always check to see if a shape looks “pasted on.”

The rabbit rule (Suzi Short)

If a horizontal passage come up to a vertical edge, it should come out the other side.

composition is really preparation

If you were building something in wood, let’s say a table, you wouldn’t just grab a piece of wood and start cutting.  You would plan ahead.  You would start by making a little sketch and then follow that with a better drawing with measurements.  Even when cutting wood the adage is measure twice, cut once.    So why is it that some people think they should just start by putting paint on paper without any preparation?  Actually I think some of the blame lies with the artists who make it appear as if that’s what they do.  It’s a bit of a parlor trick.   Someone grabs some art materials and knocks off a decent piece of  work in 15 to 20 minutes like the people in the park drawing portraits.  It’s sometimes said that it takes 20 years and then 20 minutes to do such a thing   But as Ron Ranson points out, there are thousands of artists who can do that sort of thing and it isn’t art.  It’s like the first step, getting adept with the materials. Sometimes it’s called illustration.   You have to go to the next stage to make a sincere, heart -elt piece of art.  And that requires preparation.  You have to want to communicate something about what you are looking at.

Using this contraption we can actually learn where someone looks when shown a painting.  It works by bouncing a light off the eyeball which gives us an idea of where the subject is looking and superimposing this information on a video that is being taken at the same time of the painting at which the subject is looking.  (The video lens is attached to the eyeglasses.)  The result is a graphic of the painting with lines or dots on it where the eye was focusing.

We now know without a doubt that the eye does not walk into a painting and follow that road.  The eye doesn’t move like a person.  That’s not surprising, if you think about it, because the eye doesn’t have legs.  What actually happens is that our eyes jump all over the picture in quick, jerky movements. See here for a U-Tube video that demonstrates this.

Some of what seems to be going on when someone looks at a landscape is quite primitive.  We look for snakes under the rocks and predators behind the trees.  So that kinda of puts an end to the “lead the eye into the painting” myth which ranks up there with “if you mix too many paints you’ll get mud” (you get gray) and that “all the painter needs is the three primary colors” which I have railed against in this blog.

As far as keeping the “eye” in the painting, one strategy is to have some puzzling narrative going on.  That’s Eric Fischl’s strategy.  If you check out his painting, you will often be puzzled about what the people are doing.  That keeps you looking at the painting particularly since there are often fairly overt erotic overtones.  Your eye jumps around, as I have already pointed out, doing its thing, while you’re trying to make some sense of the narrative which, of course, you can’t.

However, I don’t buy this idea that you must keep the person looking at the painting.  The visual system gets things very rapidly.  In museums it is often lamented that people only spend on average 8 seconds looking at a painting, and these are masterpieces!  They can’t all be philistines.   On the other hand, there are paintings which you can never get tired of  looking at.  As you do so, you see more and more.  In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Lehman Wing they have ordinary chairs that you can move around and sit and look at some impressionist paintings.  It doesn’t seem to require leading the eye into the painting, but more having a seat!

More importantly we are not in the guide business, neither for eyes nor people, nor are we in the business of keeping someone looking at the painting for whatever reason.  We are in the business of making paintings that other people hopefully find beautiful (or “sublime”), and want to own.  The painting should look good immediately and keep on looking good over time.  However, there is a opinion that no painting should remain on the walls for a long period of time.  One should have a rotating collection and “curate” his own space by changing what he or she puts on the walls, but that’s a modification that doesn’t negate that what we are looking to create is beauty.

But first, if we’re trying to make something beautiful,  let’s define what we mean by “beauty”.  I prefer behavioral terms.  Beauty creates a disposition to act in the person experiencing it to do one or all of three things:

A. protect and preserve what is felt to be beautiful or sublime.   You would fish something out of the garbage and prevent it from being thrown out if you thought it was beautiful.  You would stop someone from damaging beautiful painting in the museum.

B.  Take home what you found beautiful or sublime so that you could continue to look at it, for example, a beautiful rock from the beach.   You would want to own something you thought was beautiful if it were within your means.

C. On seeing something beautiful or sublime you would be inspired to make something similar if you could (to reproduce it.).  That’s maybe why the Metropolitan Museum of Art very perceptively always seems to have art-making sets (albeit expensive, bad ones)  on the way out of its special exhibit.   There must be enough naive people exiting the exhibits to be inspired to try to paint and purchase equipment to do so at the museum rather than an art supply store.

Now what is beautiful to which you are responding is often not the painting itself but what is being depicted by the painting.  Can there be a beautiful painting of something extremely ugly, revolting or horrible?  Would you fish this painting out of the garbage, would you want to hang it in your living room, and would you want to paint similar paintings?  Does someone purchase a sunset painting because the painting itself is beautiful or is it the sunset itself (albeit captured successfully by the artist?)   There is a kind of second hand beauty in the painting if it’s representational.

Of course, there can be many reasons for buying a painting other then its intrinsic beauty.  which I am not going to discuss here.   There are people buying paintings for investment purposes or to impress their guests.  In the latter case the painting must be instantly readable, preferably by an easily recognizable artist, and (as the New York Times put it) “scream expensive.”    This has nothing to do with composition, of course, and everything to do with marketing. This is a separate  People also collect art to hang out in the art scene.

Composition versus design

I would start with considering Greg Albert’s point that no two intervals of anything should be equal (see his book here.)  In The Simple Secret to Better Painting he emphasizes that no two trees should be the same size, no two areas of color should be the same size, no areas of tone should be the same size, etc.  The picture should not be divided in half by the horizon or vertically.  This is a basic foundation of composition.  There is probably a neurological reason.  Animals including us are always alert to possible danger.  One of those dangers is a trap or a predator.  Any unnatural “composition” of things in the environment reads as artificial and possible created to deceive.

viewfinders

So you’ve come to a place to paint.  Most painters make a square shape with the index finger and thumb of both hands to view the scene before them.  It’s usually billed as helpful for composition, but it fact it is more helpful for drawing.  You get an idea of where on the canvas something is placed because the borders created by your fingers and be used as substitutes for the sides of your support.  It takes a bit of remembering.

There are four other sorts of view finding tools:

1.  There is the Claude mirror see here.  This was a convex, grayed mirror very popular with tourists during the Romantic Era.  It was used by turning your back to the scene.  It’s just an interesting historical anecdote, but the reducing lens and the graying is worth noting.  I’ve tried to paint with it, but I found it disconcerting to turn my back to the scene and depend on such a small image.

2.  There are reducing lenses.   Probably more useful for someone at a desk who doesn’t want to be bothered to get up, hang up his work and walk away to get an overall impression.  But it is also useful in the field because, to follow Corot’s dictum, the painting should start 30 feet from the artist.

3.  There are viewfinders that simply replace the use of fingers mentioned above.   They can be configured to have the opening resemble the shape of the support you are using.   Some of them have grids that can be used to place objects on the support.  Some have grayscales and complements.  Others have the capacity to have a red filter which is supposed to make it easier to see values.  An old slide holder can be used as well.

4.  Then there is a newer version of the viewfinder which has both the opening of the regular viewfinder and a reducing lens that can be flipped up.

The problem with viewfinders is that we actually don’t want to make an exact replica of what is before us.   It only crops.  It doesn’t “design”.  Composition is not restricted to cropping.  I, myself, do not find any of the viewfinders better than making a rectangle with my fingers.  The reducing lens in the field can be informative particularly if the subject is close.  It pushes it out in space which usually makes a better landscape.

There is a quote from Stapleman Kearns on the subject:

“Well, the problem is this……. Cropping may be composition, but it is not design. Simply cutting a window out of nature and copying that, is the lowest form of composition as it doesn’t include deliberate arrangement of the shapes and elements of a painting. The literal and exact representation of nature before you is a “must have” skill for the landscape painter. But it is not the highest form of art. It is journalism, not poetry. Fine landscape painters design their paintings. They arrange the elements and shapes within that picture into an artistic presentation. The artist who literally copies nature before him is going to have his lunch eaten by the artist who can design a picture, rather than having it imposed on him by the happenstance arrangement of the shapes as they naturally occur before them. A camera can crop, it takes human decision making to arrange, and an artist to arrange beautifully.”

Actually Degas using cropping in rather a radical way from a design point of view.  In some of his ballet dancing picture there can be a leg jutting into the picture doing a kick of some sort with no image of the person to whom it belongs.  Photographs do that sort of thing naturally.   I just recently designed a landscape in which, just for fun, everything human or manmade is cropped (cars, people, etc.) by the sides and top and bottom of the support.  I think it works.

more to come: see composition 2 here

If you happen to run into Spanish watercolorists, you frequently see them with this palette.  The wells can hold a full tube of paint.  If you paint big with big brushes like I sometimes do, this is helpful.  It has a thumb holder on the other side. I should mention that it is made out of thicker metal than what we are used to and is heavier.  I don’t have any trouble holding it in my hand, but from a design point of view, it should be made of lighter metal.   It is also made of metal that will eventually rust.  Many people seem interested in it, but unfortunately it is unavailable outside of Spain.

It appears to be made in Barcelona by one company that does not sell to the public, and it is sold by another company in Barcelona that does not have an international internet business.  It is best to e-mail them in Spanish  and translate their Spanish replies(use google translate). See here for the mention of the palette on the store’s internet site.  I don’t think you can order one through it, but you can get the price in Euros.

I was able to get one after an extensive e-mail correspondence.  It was hard to give them my credit card number and for shipping I had to wire Euros to their bank.  First they wanted to send it via a next-day (in Europe) Spanish package service like FedEx which would cost $75 (US), but I eventually prevailed on Mireia Garcia, who was very nice, to use regular mail.

The name of the store  (not manufacturer) is VICENÇ PIERA <info@vpiera.com>.  I would write to Mireia Garcia there who, after all, has done this once before.  (VICENÇ PIERA, perhaps coincidentally, was a famous Spanish soccer player, now dead.)  Be very clear about your name and address, but mostly your name since Spanish name conventions are very different than ours.

Here’s the box it comes in with the manufacturer’s name (“Artist”).  They recommend getting it from Vicenc Piera.

What we really need is for some art supplier here to import it.  I wrote to Cheap Joe’s, but I’m sure the e-mail got lost in a miscellaneous pile.

Good luck, if you try at get one.   If you do try, please leave a comment since many people view this post and could benefit from your experience.  Thanks.

Homer's studio/home Prout's Neck, Maine

I’ve done a post on Homer’s brushes here and his paper here and his paint here and here and I’ve posted a picture of his tin palette here , so why not do something about his studio.  Fortunately one of the people who left a comment (Louis Mezian) mentioned that he had visited Prout’s Neck and actually got into the studio and took pictures.  He has been kind enough to scan them and allow them to be posted here with his comments.

The background of the studio

Winslow Homer  settled on the coast of Maine in 1884 on some land adjacent to his father’s summer home at Prout’s Neck in Scarborough, Maine. He moved his father’s carriage house about 150 feet along the coast and retained architect John Calvin Stevens to modify the former stables into his studio and residence. Until his death in 1910,  he worked there when he wasn’t traveling, for example to the Bahamas.

The Portland Museum of Art purchased Winslow Homer’s Studio in January of 2006 and retained Mills Whitaker Architects in early 2007 to begin planning an restoration to restore the building to the time of Homer’s life (not, of course, to what it was like when it was a stable. The facility will be used for an artist/scholar-inresidence program, for special events hosted by the Museum Director and for high school art classes.