The glories of watercolour!

The joy with watercolour is the glorious colours you can create. Pigments interact with each other as weak as the water to create the most marvellous effects ~ well, that is the hoped for outcome. It is easy to end up with a mud~like mess. I have painted with watercolour for a number of years now, but still feel as if there is a huge amount for me to learn. So, I signed up for Helen Burrow’s workshop on colour mixing.

I have been to some of Helen’s workshops before, and love her teaching style. I was not disappointed with this one, largely because she structured the three days so that each exercise used skills from the exercise before. She encouraged us to play ~ it’s only paint and paper. As adults we rarely allow ourselves to experiment. It is so easy to let the end product dominate, forcing ourselves to stick to the tried and true.

The very first activity was playing. After drawing circles on the paper we dropped in paints of different colours. None of them had to be perfect, they were simply pompoms. It was wonderful to see how they ran into each other and produced new colours. You really loosen up when you are doing seven, eight, nine of them. While the original vibrant colours are stunning, look at the colours that are mixed where they meet. There are some interesting purples and neutrals here.

My colour mixing pompoms ~ beautiful vibrant colours (Photo copyright: Anne Lawson 2016)

For the next exercise Helen directed us to draw three “petunias”, to which we added specific colours. The first triad was cobalt blue, aureolin and permanent rose, all transparent and clean. The second triad was alizarin crimson, windsor yellow and phthalo blue, again transparent but rich and jewel-like. The third included opaque colours, cadmium red, cadmium yellow and cerulean blue.

The three “petunia” triads (Photo copyright: Anne Lawson, 2016)

Do you have a favourite combination of colours?

At last, I was developing a deeper understanding of the different colours. It is important to know how the qualities of paints [transparent, warm/cool, staining, their bias etc] to know which ones to use when. For example, transparent colours will create darker hues than opaque ones.

Our last activity for Day #1 was to choose our own triads and experiment. I especially loved the combination of quinacridone gold, viridian and my own purple (cobalt and quinacridone magenta). The mix is in the bottom left corner. BTW the four big blobs in the centre and right are wet on wet, the three down the left side are wet on dry. The last photo is of our show and tell at the end of the day, showing great diversity between artists.

(Photo copyright: Anne Lawson, 2016)

(Photo copyright: Anne Lawson, 2016)

(Photo copyright: Anne Lawson, 2016)

Day #2 and we were raring to go. There was more colour mixing as a warm up. Then Helen asked us to compare Windsor and Newton sepia with Daniel Smith sepia. They are probably the leading watercolour paint brands. She was encouraging us to look at the different brands because colours are not consistent across brands. Sepia is a good example. The W and N is blacker and duller than the DS, which seems to have more warmth and depth to it.

The next challenge was to create our own sepia! With some help from Helen I used burnt sienna and French ultramarine to produce a lovely soft grey.

Then we became a little more botanical, as we traced a photo of a rose and transferred the tracing to watercolour paper. Then, using our sepia mix we did a tonal drawing of the rose. The photo shows the finished tonal drawing, with a spray of yellow as I began the next part of adding a little colour to the painting.

(Image and photo copyright: Anne Lawson, 2016)

More colour added to the tonal drawing (Image and photo copyright: Anne Lawson, 2016)

So, by Day #3 we were ready to do a rose painting. It sounds daunting, but as Helen’s previous activities had lead us to this point, we had the confidence!

It was time to put the knowledge from the previous two days to use ~ looking at the photo to see what colours there were, understanding the value of those colours (was my selection enough of a range of values along the grey scale?), thinking about warm and cool colours, complimentary colours. Then to mixing. You can see by the colour chart that I had to work my way through a few mixes. The new gamboge and permanent rose, top right, was the first mix, then I worked my way to quinacridone gold and magenta. It is the quiz gold that gives the painting its glow. There are other mixes too, a cool, soft blue for the cast shadows and the warm quinacridone magenta and sepia mix for other shadows.

Colour chart around the tonal drawing (Image and photo copyright: Anne Lawson, 2016)

A new piece of paper, a new tracing of the rose and I was in heaven, gently moving around each petal to let the paint and water work their magic.

First wash on the rose. (Image and photo copyright: Anne Lawson, 2016)

There’s still a way to go, but I know that the colours are working and that I have put down a good foundation. I think I like painting roses!

 

Colour bias and hue ~ Day 2

I left the workshop on Tuesday feeling satisfied. I had battled with my painting, and to honest, it won. However I learnt a great deal and was looking forward to two more days of sitting and painting. The only problem was that Helen had mentioned roses for Day 2.

During day 1 of the workshop Helen Burrows took us through tone and grey scales. Day 2 was to be hue and colour bias.

As I mentioned before, I can see tone fairly easily. However, colour confuses me. I was a long time into my artistic learning before I was confident to use colour. While I can mix a colour reasonably accurately, my use of colour always seemed a bit hit and miss. Now I understand that my problem was that I had missed out on a basic concept — the colour wheel.

A colour wheel explains bias in colour. There are 3 primary colours ~ red, blue and yellow. Everyone knows that! But the primary colours that we have in our paint tubes are not pure. They have a bias towards the secondary colours of green, orange and purple. This is why, at times we wonder whether a yellow is yellow or green, or why a blue can also look purplish. It is important to know the bias of your paints. You can make your painting sing by using the right colours, by thinking about 3 “rules”. When you don’t take bias into account you end up with an uninteresting mix as the colours compete, often neutralising each other.

I have create a very rough colour wheel, using coloured pencils but it will help illustrate the rules.

Colour wheel

Rule 1: Family is always welcome. They are the other colours/hues around it. However, you need to bear in mind the bias of the colour. For example, is your blue a green blue or has it a bias to purple? If to the green, then the hues of your colour will be somewhere in the greeny blues. It is to those hues that you will look to mix your paint.

Rule 2: Next door neighbours are friends So a colour only a little away from the one you want will work harmoniously. Blue/green. Yellow/orange etc.

Rule 3: Opposites attract. These are the colours opposite each other on the colour wheel. Purple/yellow. Blue/orange. Green/red. They are the ones that can add zing and depth to your work. Think about a blue room with accents of terracotta (orange). Interestingly (well, to me, anyway!) to make a colour darker you add its complimentary colour. Want a darker green? Add red.

So, Helen took us through colour bias and wheels and hues. I came away with a much stronger understanding. Yay! Then to our roses. Maybe not so Yay!

Roses are complex. Their shapes are complex; their colours and hues are complex. They are for Grown Up Painters. But Helen wasn’t letting me get away with that mind set! And I wasn’t letting me get away with any more tantrums. So with my colours mixed and my hue scales done (sort of), I settled down to draw and then paint the rose bud. This is what I ended up with 🙂 . I think it looks like a flouncy fish….but I am happy with what I learnt.

My “rose bud”!! (Image and photo copyright: Anne Lawson 2014)

The original drawing was not accurate. That meant that I got lost in the drawing, not sure at times of where the lights, darks and mid~tones were. Lesson 1~make your original drawing as accurate as possible.

I could see the highlights and darks, and managed to get most of those down in the washes. Lesson 2~be very careful of your highlights. Unlike oils and acrylics, where you add white paint to make a highlight, watercolour relies on the white of the paper. Many a cry of anguish has been heard from a watercolour painter who has mistakenly painted over her white paper!

I think I was getting the mid-tones. Lesson 3~remember that the mid-tone in paint is the middle section of hue scale.

And lastly I did my usual trick of getting carried away in one area, one petal, putting in all the lovely detail. Lesson 4~remember to work over the whole, to compare tone and hue to the overall. Detail comes later.

So it wasn’t a perfect rose ~ or even a perfect fish! But I had fun. I played, and learnt so much through playing.

[If you are interested in finding out more Windsor and Newton have a really interesting article here. It will give you more detailed information. Maybe more accurate too!]

Tone and colour, Day 1

I am a botanic artist. Watercolour is the medium that most botanic artists use because it translucent. It allows the light to bounce through the paint, giving a luminosity and depth. Many artists handle watercolour like masters (or mistresses, as so many of us are women).

Not me. Give me a pencil and I can draw you a garlic bulb. Finding tone with a pencil is wonderful. Finding tone/hue with watercolours is often a battle. 

So, when I saw a workshop on tone, hue and colour mixing I was there! 3 days of painting — bliss 😀 (It certainly helped to know that it was the first week back at school for the year. In my old life as a primary school teacher I would have been there, distributing books and pencils and organising seating arrangements. Now I was painting in books, using pencils and not giving a toss about who sat where!)

As an added bonus the workshop was taken by Helen Burrows, very talented botanic artist and teacher. She is a superb painter of camellias.

In this series of posts, I thought that you might like to see a little of behind the scenes of a painting.

We began the day twisting ribbon, that very decorative ribbon with wire edges, into interesting curvy shapes. Then Helen spoke to us about grey scales. She was horrified when a couple of us, including me, not only hadn’t ever done a grey scale, but didn’t really know what one was. I know that you will know, but let me explain it to the others. 🙂

Tone is the amount of light that falls on an object. Think of that art room cliche, a spherical object, such as an orange. If the light is coming in from the top left where it hits, top left, will be the highlights. The bottom right of the shape will be the darkest (except for a sliver of reflected light….). In between those two areas will be various tones from the very light to the very dark, and a range of mid-tines between. Understanding those tones and translating them to paper will give the orange its 3D effect.

A grey scale becomes a very useful tool. Because I had never done one before, I didn’t realise how useful. This photo is of my grey scale. As you can see, 10 is as dark as your pencil can get and 1 is the white of the paper. You can also see that there is not a lot of difference in my scale between 3, 4, 5 and 6. Interestingly, I now realise that this is an issue in my drawings too. My mid-tones (3, 4, 5 and 6) are often very similar in my work. Having a grey scale handy will be a good reference.

Grey scale for an 8B pencil

On to our ribbons. Helen asked us to use our grey scales to create tonal drawings of them. As I said before, I love pencil, and so was able to get right into this task. I was pleased with my drawing. I think it has  drama and life.

Tonal drawing (Photo and image copyright: Anne Lawson, 2014)

Then we moved onto mixing a neutral tint for an underpainting. And that’s where things started to go wrong!

A neutral tint is, Helen explained, made of the colours that you would be using in the painting, mixed so that they become interesting greys. Interesting greys?! The others were coming up with beautiful colours, soft and sensuous. Mine were not working! They weren’t grey, they weren’t soft. It didn’t help that I was using cerulean, a blue that is notorious for granulating on the paper. Sometimes that effect is wonderful, sometimes, like now, just annoying!

I applied it to another drawing of the ribbon. This is what I ended up with 😦  although I added the rose pink later in an attempt to improve it. It didn’t. I had no lovely soft greys, no lovely soft washes. Just clunky lumps of colour.

Grrrr (Photo and image copyright: Anne Lawson, 2014)

At this point I may have looked like a middle aged (hmmm, maybe slightly older!) woman, sitting at a table, battling painting. In my mind I was a child, rolling around on the floor, having a good old tantrum ~ “Mine’s not working!! Everyone else can do it!! I don’t like this!! I don’t want to play any more!! I want to go home!!!”

But, after promising myself the adult equivalent of a lolly (a glass of wine ~ at home 🙂 ) I picked myself off the mental floor and started to work out what I was doing and not doing. While I don’t usually go to the extreme of a mental tantrum, as I am painting I often go through a time when I feel that it is not going right ~ just not jelling into what the finished work should be. Usually I work my way through that and then, at some time the painting just pops into place.

This ribbon was doomed from the outset. No amount of work was going to make it all right, but that’s okay. I think that often we are so focussed on the final product (“This has to be a perfect painting/novel/poem/etching etc”) that we forget that playing and having fun is such an important part. And you learn through play too.

So I left the room on the first day with a smile, only slightly nervous about Day 2. Did Helen really say we were going to paint ROSES? Roses are tricky. Roses are for grown up painters, not for me.