Le Regent Cinema - Bastia, Corsica
This month the featured location in The Virtual Paintout (blog) was Corsica. I chose this little cinema in Bastia for my watercolor painting. There were a lot of interesting places on the island that would make great paintings. It is interesting process to decide whether to paint buildings or scenery for these Virtual Paintouts. It is also interesting just to roam around the locations that Bill selects each month.
Calvin Theater fron Northampton 1997 series
This is another one of the 50 paintings I did back in 1997 of scenes of Northampton, Mass. I am working on a book of these paintings. They are mixed media and some of the things I used to make them include pens, white-out, sharpies, watercolor, acrylic, pencil, felt pen, ink, highlighter, metallic pens, and china markers.
This is from when the theater wasn’t used too much. I think they were showing movies for $1 on the weekends. Nowadays it has been completely refurbished and is a music hall.
Casa del Sol Watercolor
This is my latest painting – Casa del Sol. 9×12 on Arches 140lb hot pressed.
One year ago, when I started this blog to document my progress in watercolor painting, I used the Casa del Sol as the first subject for my paintings. This is a link to my first blog entry. Don’t laugh too much – it was my first painting.
With this painting I decided to go in with opaque white in a few spots rather than try and preserve white areas. Overall I think it is ok – definitely a big leap from a year ago. Lately I have been thinking of working with acrylic or oils, in that I might have an easier time with being able to layer the paint easier and fix mistakes, but I’ve decided to keep going with watercolor for another year. Once I use up my block of 9×12 paper I am going to go even smaller.
Peck's Skipper - a butterfly - Watercolor
This is based on a photo I took last summer of a skipper, a kind of butterfly. The main things I worked on here were building up washes to get a dark value for the background.
I was experimenting with getting to a certain value and then putting a light glaze with different pigemnts to see the effect. At one point the darker values were several layers of Hooker’s Green, Lemon Yellow, and Van Dyke Brown. Then I did a wash of aliz crimson, then followed with cad yellow. Each wash would completely change (in a very subtle way) how the whole painting looked. I liked how the greens look when you put a thin wash over with cad yellow – I did that on some of the weeds.
I have to get back into the practice of doing thumbnails and tonal value studies BEFORE I start painting. I haven’t done that for the last four or five paintings, and I get into situations where the composition gets a little awkward and I am creating the values as I go – doesn’t always work out.
The other thing this one got me thinking about, and I am getting better about it, is planning ahead for the details. Often I will start with big washes, and then by the time I get down to the little areas and the dry brush details, I see that the big washes have left me with difficult things to fix. In this case the back of the wings are a good example.
Overall I think this one came out ok. I want to go in with a razor and lift out some paint for white highlights, but I have to get up the courage or practice on some other paper first.
I found a great book in a used book store by Ernest W. Watson called “Course in Pencil Sketching“. I am going through each exercise to improve my sketching and conceptual approach to sketching. There are some great tips in this book that not only apply to pencil sketching, but to watercolor painting. In both sketching and watercolor the ‘white’ is the paper. Here are a few tips I have picked up so far:
1. make the edge of a shadow where it hits the light spots darker than the rest of the shadow.
2. if there is an dark opening – a door, under a bridge, etc. leave areas of white in it to break up the dark and make it interesting.
3. Look for reflected light in a shadow and leave white.
4. Break up linear areas (like clapboard) with diagonal lines to make interesting.
Here a some of my first sketches I did based on exercises in the book:
House - pencil sketch
House 2 - pencil sketch
Windmill - pencil sketch
Caterpillar - Watercolor Painting
This watercolor painting of a black swallowtail caterpillar is based on a photo I took last summer. we saw a butterfly lay some eggs on our dill and we followed the progress of the caterpillar hatching and then going through subsequent instars until it got to this size.
This painting was done mainly with three new pigments I bought last month – rose madder, naples yellow, and manganese blue. All of these are very airy and transparent. I slowly built this painting up in layers of washes. I think this is my best painting so far overall as far as being a complete whole. I am finding that if I have a plan and just work it out slowly then everything works itself out. Also, if I just copy what is there in the photo then the ‘realism’ part of it works out ok. It is when I try and put in what I think I see that it loses the realism part. The key is slowly building the dark values and leaving the white of the paper for the light values.
I am reading a book about Winslow Homer called Watercolors by Winslow Homer: the Color of Light. There is one chapter which goes into detail about how Homer studied a book by Michel-Eugene Chevreul called Chevreul on Color. Chevreul (wiki link here) was a chemist and director of a dye factory. He did research to discover why some dyes looke washed out. He discovered that the dyes weren’t fading; the proximity to some dyes next to those of other colors caused optical effects in which the dyes appeared faded. Chevreul’s book (link to google book copy here) was Homer’s “Bible”.
Michel-Eugene Chevreul
Anyway, the chapter in the book about Winslow Homer (by Judith Walsh) goes into detail about Chevreul’s color theories and how Homer incorporated them into his paintings. It is a great chapter because it gives valuable advice in a simple way that can be applied to your own artworks. I was planning on putting the points of interest here, but I quickly realized that I can’t do it justice in a few sentences. I highly recommend that you get a copy of the book and study that chapter – it will be well worth it.
Chevy 3800 Watercolor
This watercolor is based on photo I took of an old abandoned truck in Hadley. I could probably put in some more detail to try and make it pop a little more, but I’m ready to move on to something new. I added the white highlites with gouache. I was using china white, but it was too transparent. Then I got the idea to try and scratch the paint off the paper, but the china white was kind of tacky and didn’t come off easily. I don’t like using resist.
I transfered the drawing to the paper, but when I laid down my first wash it pulled up a lot of the pencil, so some of the lettering/shadows is a little rough. This painting was a good challenge – I’ll probably go back at some point and put some more detail some day.
I am now working on a painting of a caterpillar using the three new paints I bought – rose madder, naples yellow, and manganese blue. These paints seem very transparent, so this next painting will be delicate.
I did this painting to relax in between working on my “Chevy 3800″ watercolor (which will be done in a few days I hope).
This painting is for a great website called The Virtual Paintout where every month artists are invited by Bill Guffey to visit a city on google maps street view, and make a painting of a scene they find interesting. This month the location is Mexico City. Apart from presenting many exciting art possibilities, Mexico City is a fascinating place – and I spent hours roaming around looking at the city and environs. I decided to paint a watercolor of the Museo Jose Luis Cuevas where there were giant sculptures on the street.
I’ve been reading a book about Winslow Homer and his watercolors. It is very inspiring. There is an interesting chapter that mentions how Winslow studied a book called Chevreul on Colors. I will look into this more.
Rusty Bolt - watercolor painting
This is a painting of a rusty bolt. Overall I am happy how it worked out. It is about 9 x 12 on hot press. The thing I am working on is to keep the washes really light and build up the values slowly in this manner. One trick that Rey Milici told me about is to alternate the layers of wash with cool and warm, rather than just repeating washes with the same colors. The background is alternated with washes of cad red/indigo and aliz crimson/indigo. I also mixed different grays depending on whether they were in the light or not. So the grays in the sun were warm gray – cad red/cad yellow/ultramarine, and the grays in the shade were cool grays mixed with aliz crim/lemon yellow/ultramarine. I probably will touch it up a little bit here and there, but it is pretty much finished. I alternated warm cool layers on the dark shadow as well. It makes it look a little more interesting than just using a flat black or gray wash.
I also photographed this in the sun (thanks to a suggestion from Leslie of Lesliepaints) so the colors are a little better, plus I was able to use a higher shutter speed so its not so blurry.
Below is the drawing for this painting. This is my new process. I had a photo I took of the bolt and I use a transparency with a grid on it that I tape over the drawing. Then I make the drawing based on that. Once I have the drawing I put a bunch of graphite on the back of the drawing and then trace the parts of the drawing I want on to the watercolor paper. The graphite on the back is transfered where I draw. I like this method because I can mark up the original drawing with notes like what colors I mixed or what the different values I am shooting for are.
art seen
