The first step: ridding yourself of the idea that it takes inborn talent, and then committing yourself to practice
If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all. Michelangelo.
The first step is to get rid of the idea that to make beautiful watercolors depends on your inborn talent. It depends on practice, a lot of practice, and what is missing in art instruction and watercolor instruction in particular is a set of practice exercises that makes sense.
I will try to address the very practical issue of acknowledging the need for practice here briefly before getting on to designing a practice routine. Skip this section if you already have come to this conclusion.
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I think what distinguishes humans more than anything else is that there are some of us that can perform amazing demonstrations of skill that are not necessary for the average person in his or her daily life. We are entertained by these people. As a completely random example of what I mean, there is a boy of about 12 in New York’s Central Park that rides a unicycle in complex patterns while juggling three pins. He performs a great variety of other juggling demonstrations as well, gathers a crowd, who drop money into a hat. There are endless other illustrations of these skills like playing an instrument, singing, and various athletic skills like playing basketball. Art making is one of these extraordinary skills, and right across the path from the juggler are several artists making pencil portrait and/or selling art.
These skills invariably look effortless and mysterious to those of us who cannot do them. In fact, there is something to this. They are not done by conscious effort. These skills are on automatic pilot, so to speak, and are therefore effortless if by that we mean “conscious effort”. For example, even as a child I could sight-read piano music and, to my surprise and puzzlement, conduct a conversation with someone at the same time. That was because sight-reading did not require any conscious effort. I had to look at the music, but I didn’t have to make the effort to think. I did not say to myself that’s a C followed by a F. In fact thinking about it would completely throw a monkey wrench into what I was doing. I couldn’t think as fast as I was playing.
This leads people to be mystified by how the skills were acquired, and to attribute it to talent, some inborn difference from other people. Some people, particularly in recent times, encourage this mystification by invoking the idea of inborn talent and the idea of specialness. “You can’t ever do this, only I can.” Artists have, I believe, been some of the major culprits here. So, when I meet someone who says that he or she cannot draw (because they do not have the talent), I am always upset and annoyed because they have accepted the talent myth. It’s ignorant, and it’s ignorant about something I am devoted to. I usually make an effort by asking, for example, did they know that before the camera was invented everyone was taught to draw in school and expected to learn how competently in order to make graphic records of things.
So many of these effortless skills that impress us (like tight rope walking and juggling) are actually the result of extremely extended practice of certain exercises (with clear feedback). This kind of practice shifts the skill from consciousness to parts of the brain that are automatic, fast, and can multitask easily. In fact, typing this is on automatic pilot for me. I am not looking at the keyboard and I am not thinking about what my fingers are doing. It is not because I was born with special hands, but because I practiced.
But here is the bad news. The amount of practice necessary to be at the very top for many of these skills amounts to 3 hours and day for 10 years. You can sort young violinist seeking education into those who will be soloists, those who will play in orchestras, and those who will be music teachers basically by how much they have practiced. Soloists have practiced 10,000 hours (3 hours a day for ten years. ) Of course, typing doesn’t require this amount of practice, and, at this stage of its development, making a watercolor may not either.
An essential part of this practice is having some idea of what you are trying to accomplish and to be able to break down the goal into specific steps to practice. For example, in tennis one practices the serve and/or returning the serve over and over again. Just mindless repetition is not the goal or everyone driving a car for over ten years would be an expert.
I would suggest reading Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success by Matthew Syed (see here) to read more about the evidence for this assertion. You may be of the “talent” must be necessary school, but I really do not intend and cannot dissuade you here. I think reading the book will do the job. It is in your best interest to learn about this if you want to be really competent at making watercolors.
Not only is practice necessary to obtaining various skills, and we are thinking of course of watercolor, it is necessary for the maintenance of the skill as well. Paderewski the famous violinist said “If I don’t practice for one day, I know it; if I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it; if I don’t practice for three days, the audience knows it.” I don’t know about you, but I want to get to that level of proficiency in watercolor.
Before you groan about practice, most people who succeed in practicing this much do so because they like what they are doing, and this is because they focus on the practicing itself, the process, rather than the results. If they have a good teacher/coach that’s the first thing he teachers. What happens is that you start to have certain sensory inputs from the practice. If you’re practicing tennis serves, you begin to have an amplified sense of the feel you get when you hit the ball correctly. If you are doing scales on the piano, you begin to connect your finger sensation with the sound in a new way that is pleasurable. The teenage doing piano scales is “bored”, meaning he or she is getting no information from what he is doing and his or her mind is wandering. If you’re doing watercolor washes, you really like the wash you just put down. (You’re not trying to complete the picture.) The way I heard it said in athletic training is “Athletes love their sweat.”
I think this is as far as I want to go here to argue for practice. What I really want to do is to talk about designing a practice regimen. If you not yet convinced, fine. Take a look below and see if you’d like to do it.
practice routines: the “assembly line” system of practice
Repetition is not all that is required for the type of practice that leads to developing the skills, rather than the knowledge, necessary to be really good at watercolor painting. Repetition is, however, a part of it. The type of practice necessary to get good at something is called sometimes “deliberate practice” or “purposeful practice”. In addition the skill practiced has to be outside of your current realm of reliability and outside of your comfort zone. You have to attempt something you are not good at. But you have to break it down into units. In tennis, you practice your serve over and over again, and you practice all the other elements of tennis one at a time (backhand, etc) before you put it all together into a game.
1. You find something at which you’re not good.
2. You break it down into its elements.
3. You do that element over and over again.
The only book I have ever read that discusses something like practice is Hawthorne of Painting. Charles W. Hawthorne was a legendary teacher of oil painting in Provencetown, Cape Cod, and single-handedly turned it into an art colony. He encouraged his students to do what he called “starts” as many as they could. His point was that they were not going to do masterpieces and to labor over a poor start for days was futile. Kevin Macferson has picked up this idea and suggests students do 100 starts when doing plain air oil paintings. This would be something like a block in.
In watercolor this is not particularly possible. Here’s my idea of how to practice and what I have begun doing. I call it assembly line practice.
But before I begin I want to say that the type of watercolor I want to get really good at is one in which there is a well drawn center of interest and a very abstract, splashy background. Basically Homer and Sargent did this type of watercolor (and it goes without saying that they practiced it day after day).
Drawing has to be practiced continually and independently of watercolor painting to become competent and to stay competent. I go to various live model drawing sessions in New York City, trying for once a week attendance. Sometimes I use a pencil and sometimes just watercolor wash. I should say that I have a background in drawing and oil painting (a MFA), so this is to keep sharp not to learn how. I also draw in the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Natural History with friends. I have a blog post on the science behind drawing which you should look at if you’re interested here. The skill is a short-term visual memory one not in the hands incidentally. ( I mentioned that I have an MFA; I also was trained as a psychiatrist (I have an MD.))
A perfectly acceptable alternative is to copy a center of interest thus bypassing the need for drawing well. Use a photograph, print it, and use graphite transfer paper to place it on the watercolor paper. Since you will probably have to print it on 8 by 11 paper and you may want it larger, you should know about splitting and tiling software. Tiling is splitting the image and printing it on several sheets of 8 by 11 paper that can be placed next to each other and taped together, like tiles on the kitchen wall. You choose the size of the final image to fit your paper. Transfer paper comes in large enough sheets to fit under the entire tiled image if you are using the usual size watercolor paper. Imprint Studio’s tiling software is freeware, and I find it very easy to use. See here.
It’s the watercolor exercises I want to discuss. What I have developed for myself concerns the background more than anything else not the drawing.
I work on 1/4 imperial sheets (11×15) of water color paper both front and back. which I tear off a full imperial sheet. Right now I’m using Kilimangaro paper from Cheap Joes because I have a lot of it around. Another good paper is Bockingford which is often used by pros in England even ‘though it’s made from wood chips not cotton. But it is probably best to use paper that you will continue to work on because every paper is different and you have to learn about each one works.
What I have been doing is lots of landscapes of a sky, some trees, and a field with grasses, maybe a house and some water. I improvise the scene, but I do them in a particular way. I do them in what I call an assembly line way. I do each element of the scene one at a time over and over again. That is I practice a lot of skies, on the front and back of sheets, and let them dry. Sometimes after one wash has dried, I pick it up and do another over it as is necessary with certain types of complex skies. So I have a scattering of small watercolors drying on all the surfaces in my studio as I knock out skies one after the other.
It’s like I were on an assembly line, and my job was to do the sky and pass it on to the next guy whose going to put in trees, etc. This means, of course, that I am practicing skies over and over again.
I usually try to look at a prototype while I’m doing this of Sargent, Homer, or something else that has caught my eye. I can scan it and put it on a computer in front of me. This is the feedback part. I can tell when and how what I do, my sky. differs from my model. I don’t expect to really mimic what I’m looking at, but I can tell when I get something that’s close to it or not. I also put my results next to the model and sit back and look at it for a while, sometimes writing on my work what’s wrong with it. You can’t just do skies without feedback.
I find it takes a while of looking at the difference between my model and my copy to see certain things. It’s a process that is also out of consciousness and it is helpful to involve your conscious mind in something else like talking to a friend or just sitting a thinking about anything while keeping your eye on your work. Suddenly for no apparent reason you spot something. So this differs from a real assembly line because there are no time constraints, and it’s better if you take your time. People who really practice like it.
It is also helpful to line up a whole bunch of these skies, etc and see which one is the best.
I do two types of sky. There are skies with simple clouds and there are skies with very complex clouds. Winslow Homer’s skies are amazingly complex and worked over.
The simple clouds I do with a 1 inch cheap commercial paint brush bristle with which I paint the negative spaces around fluffy, white cumulus clouds and then put in shadows clouds in front of clouds. This is something like what Suzy Short recommends on her website and her CD. see here.
I do complex skies with a mop brush a la Winslow Homer. This is a dark, stormy sky with many washes, blotting out, rubbing, etc. Each passage has to be dry before doing another one.
Before long I have a pile of sky paintings. I then put in trees. But it would be enough to start with as practice doing about 100 skies. That would be on the front and back of 50 1/4 imperial size paper. That would use up about 12 full size sheets of watercolor paper.
It is not that after this 100 sky exercise, you stop and go on to another exercise. No. You do this kind of thing whenever you haven’t got anything else to do for the rest of your life.
I have since added something to the initial drawing (if there is one) which is going to be reserved white paper. I usually put a square, rather large, somewhere which is going to be the front of a house and sometimes a rock shape in the foreground, varying the position so I have to think about where I am not going to cover with the initial wash.
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