Extra time and added impetus from my sketchbook have allowed me to be fascinated by oyster shells.
Image and photo copyright: Anne Lawson 2014
Image and photo copyright: Anne Lawson 2014
Image and photo copyright: Anne Lawson 2014
You can imagine how wonderful it was to follow those quirky lines of the shells. They were fluid, but didn’t need to be really precise. I have been thinking about how to use line to build up shape. I was also playing around with a water-soluble pencil. I could draw the lines and then use water to move the graphite around the paper.
I have also been playing with simple watercolour washes to create the shells. More of them later.
I was really happy with these little studies, and have put them up for sale as a set of three in my Etsy store. I am quite okay with selling them individually too. (If you are interested in buying, follow the link to check out the details. But remember that you can always contact me here if you don’t want to go through Etsy.)
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!]
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.
Anne Lawson Art 