BEGINNERS TEACHING NOTES 2ND MAY 2018 and 9th May

This week in beginners we started to add pigment to our mountains, we explored why it is important to be able to use pale and intense / dark paint applications in paintings, see the painting below, it has both pale and dark within it, so we have chosen to do a painting with mountain ranges in it which are pale in the background and get increasingly darker towards the foreground.


We explored how to add more pigment to flat washes by doing squares of washes ranging from pale to dark by adding more pigment to each wash.

 Then we explored how to mix 3 colours together to get increasingly more neutral, the reason for this exercise is to demonstrate what happens when we push the paint around the paper as opposed to allowing the pigment to mix itself and to note these effects, one is not right and another wrong, but we just need to know how to get the effect we are after, column 1 was not pushing the paints together at all, and the result was a mix of mostly pure colour mixing on it's own giving a fresher feel, the more we pushed the pigment around, the more neutral it became ( muddy ), the steet scene above is an example of colours which have bee partially mixed in the pallet, but have been mostly allowed to mix themselves on the paper.

Some artists pre mix all their colours in the pallet, I choose not to for the above reasons, and also because I want to control the pigment to water ratio of each wash, which allows me to make sure the paint doesn't travel too far on the paper if I go in with a dryer brush, if that is required, which is impossible if the paint is pre mixed to a particular consistency.

After we had done the % mixing exercise some of our neutrals were on the yellow or red or blue spectrum, we used this to our advantage when we came to paint the 2nd line of hills by adding more of 1 pigment in relation to the other.

We painted the most distant hills first with a pale blue, making sure to paint a clear wash 1st and continue this a long way down the painting, some of found that their clear wash didn't go far enough down the painting and their pigment hit the dry paper causing a water mark which would be visible in consequent washes.

After the furthest hills had dried, we painted the 2nd furthest hills slightly darker blue with a hint of yellow, to neutralise the blue and give it a lightly greenish tinge, making sure to avoid hard edges underneath by having a deep enough clear wash.

This week, we added consecutive layers over the top of the previous washes getting incrementally darker, and making each layer slightly greener by adding a little more yellow.

We made sure to start with a clear wash from the top of the hills to the bottom line with each hill wash, to avoid a hard line forming too high up the painting, then being visible through the translucent wash of the next set of hills, we discovered that the pigment in our previous wash didn't move as it had dried and adhered to the paper.

Note a little trick on my demonstration, I left a pool of pigment at the bottom, and you can see a back run which is formed by the pigment being sucked uphill by the dryer pigment, this is something usually to be avoided, but on this occasion it can suggest vegetation of foliage.

Please bring this with you next week. : )

TEACHING NOTES FOR TUESDAY THE 1ST OF MAY

Today we were painting 2 trees in the dry brushstroke style also looking at a compositional fulcrum, in this case a big and a small tree to balance out the compositionsee previous notes, and this time also adding more colour, we were working on the tree on the right and applying the same value mass principles to this as we did last week

We looked at approaches to simplifying  tree forms and adding more colours to make our paintings look more interesting

 

We started by mixing others colours to end up with a predominant green but mixed mostly yellows and blues with other colours, here are some student examples

We then worked out the value mass of our tree, ( top picture ) last week I worked this out for my students but this week they worked it out themselves ; )Then for the 2nd class we painted a small tree to follow the value mass drawing, as moving straight onto the finished tree was a step too soon, we need more practice at this.

👆

The 1st washes of the big tree should look roughly like the one above, clearly mapping out the big colour and tone shapes, here is the original photo again, see if you can see the big shapes..On this demonstration I did more detail to show how it can be added later👇

Whilst it is important to be able to recognise and represent value mass, we may simplify the process next week, as it's a lot of information to take on board in 1 go.

25th of april BE25TH OF APRIL BEGINNER WATERCOLOUR CLASS EXERCISES

25th of april BEGINNER WATERCOLOUR CLASS EXERCISES

The first week's watercolour class for beginners  started with a pigment to water ratio series of blobs, ranging from pale to intense ( bright and in this case dark ), in equal increments, the object of this exercise is to know how much pigment to use in relation to water to get the desired intensity onto the paper, it's not always easy to get the ratio correct, see the painting of the dog below, the colours in this painting are intense ( bright )

The colours in this painting below are mostly pale neutral, and would require less pigment on the brush.

The first video is a demonstration of pigment to water ratio blobs.

Remember, the sequence goes like this, water pigment palette paper, then pigment palette paper, unlkess you need to add a little more water to keep your blobs streak free, and always mix your pigment in a small area and separately in the palette each time, this is to avoid picking up more water from a previous mix, and always mix your colours in a small area so you are not depositing more pigment on the palette than necessary. If your pigment are fresh from the tube they will be wet, so you must add tiny amounts to build up the intensity ( brightness gradually with each blob, if you have a blob that has gone too dark / intense too quickly, then clean your brush out, dry it a little on some kitchen roll, and manoeuvre your brush over the blob to lift out the excess pigment and start again.

The next exercise was to paint a colour wheel, 

The value of painting a colour wheel is firstly to consolidate what you know about pigment to water ratio, as I want you to paint all the 12 segments at medium intensity, and practice your application to avoid streaks, ( see a previous video on wash application ) but also this will teach you about colour mixing, so you can understand what colours are intense ( bright ) and what colours are neutral ( dull )see above. This colour wheel was designed by artists to help you understand which colours look good together, have another look at the painting of the dog, these colours are pleasing to the eye because they have been chosen carefully, the colour wheel can help you to achieve this, but again, more on that later.

So, start by drawing a circle and dividing into 12 segments, this is made easier if you draw a cross through the centre, and draw a V shape inside each quarter, so that you have 3 segments in each quarter, please write the terminology next to each segment, where it says primary, secondary and tertiary, primary colours are unmixed with other colours, so we will use cadmium red, cadmium yellow, and ultramarine blue, start by painting in primary red, remember pigment palette paper, so we can see how intense the colour is in the palette before applying to the paper, clean your brush out and paint in your primary yellow, don't wash this yellow off your brush, but use it to pick up some of the red pigment in your palette to create an orange in the secondary segment, you are aiming at creating an orange that looks exactly half way between the red and the yellow, don't clean your brush out, use the orange on your brush to paint in the tertiary sections next to the red and yellow, you are aiming at creating a red orange, and a yellow orange, again, try to make them look half way between their neighbours, do this by eye on your painting, and don't try to duplicate the colours on the image below.

Repeat this exercise creating greens and violets, however, you will find that using a combination of cadmium red and ultramarine will result in burgundy rather than the violet colours you see below. 

( if you want violets you must use a crimson, or pink pigment instead of Cad red )

Angliato see a video demonstration of how to paint a colour wheel, click on this link it is on Facebook watercolour classes in East 

https://www.facebook.com/Watercolour-classes-in-East-Anglia-1485202861594806/

week 1 Summer term 24th of April 2018 improvers

We begin this term by exploring composition in landscape, as some of us go out and paint on location and I thought it would be useful to address questions of what do I paint, how do I paint it, and how much can I paint in the time we have allocated.

We are continuing to tackle application in watercolour but with the aforementioned as a theme to work with.

First we looked at some simple armatures, = ( these are the structures that hold a composition together )

for example the group of trees top left is an example of a fulcrum armature, fulcrum meaning weighing scales, note that the group of trees on the right hand side are larger, and have more visual pulling power than the smaller tree on the left, the smaller tree is present to counter balance the pulling weight of the big clump of trees, without it the composition would be weighted too much on the right, but a clump of trees on the left of equal size would create a static and prosaic painting, it is thought amongst artists that this imbalance of weight creates dynamism and interest in a painting, we will be moving on to the is theme in week 2.

This is from a book called mastering composition by Ian Roberts, and it is my composition bible : )

All this was to outline where this summer term is headed, but today, we started by exploring different ways of representing trees, as we need to know how to paint trees if we are going to paint landscapes.

Here are 3 paintings by David Curtis, note that he only has high definition in certain areas, everything else is loosely described with a beautiful mix of colours and suggestion, a form of visual poetry rather than visual prose, these are not botanical paintings of trees

This painting below by Joseph Zbukvic has a similar way of suggesting trees but this is even more minimal, allowing the detail and contrast of this group of painters to be the lead singer, and the background to be the backing group, this kind of simplification is called value massing, that means tying a multitude of complex visual information together in 1 mass of colour and tone.

The 2 paintings below that are characterised again by the lack of detail on the foliage by painting them either wet in wet or by dry brushstroke

this painting below also owes it's etherial quality to the lack of detail and it's focus on light and minimal suggestion, it is stunningly beautiful and evocative of a gentle stillness.

These next paintings in my opinion is equally beautiful, by Ian sideaway, there is a great deal of detail and realistic representation here and beautifully observed, but it is unlikely that we would be able to achieve this amount of detail by a short outdoor painting trip, called painting 'en plain air' I love these painting for their strong abstract shapes which he achieves by using strong sunlight, a limited pallet and knowing where to crop the painting / view

So we have to decide what we can achieve in a short space of time for our ability level, and we settle on a simple dry brushstroke grew by Ron Ranson, the reason I chose this was because in simplifying the value mass of foliage it makes it very quick to paint, but because the edges are broken up are suggestive of foliage.

We began by practicing 'dry' brushstroke on rough watercolour paper, I used st cuthberts mill Bockingford  300gm rough wc paper.

Using dry brush stroke doesn't literally mean dry, but we use a dryer brush than normal, coat the whole length of the brush with pigment, and apply this to the paper at an extremely shallow angle, so much so, the metal part is almost touching the paper, where this went wrong, was using too much water, too steep an angle and pressing down too hard or dabbing, the brush needs to be smoothed over the paper, so that you are almost tickling it, the idea being, that your brush only comes into contact with the rough surface of the paper, leaving the textured lower parts untouched.

However, if you see in the example above, we filled in the centre of the foliage washes by pressing harder, and broke the edges up with a much lighter touch.

A quick tree for field work

The photographic reference we used

It is easier to see the areas of value mass when we convert an image to black and white and outline the  areas of light and shade, this helps us to speed up a painting effectively by initially ignoring the detail

once you have established your large colour and tone shapes ( value mass ) you can choose to keep your painting as simple as that, or you can continue to add detail with the confidence that any detail you add has to remain within the tonal value of each area of value mass, i.e shadow = light and dark at the bottom of the tonal scale, and lighted areas= light and dark within the top end of the tonal scale.this is how the painting below would have evolved, note that despite the mass of detail, you have not lost sight of the bigger tonal shapes of the tree.

The trees below are my demonstrations, we used lemon yellow and indigo to keep these washes as uncomplicated as possible whilst we got to grips with the dry brushstroke technique

For my own simple tree paintings I use a variety of colours and textures once I have established the areas of value mass, see above

Next week we will be practicing the same technique, but we will begin to get to grips with the fulcrum armature of composition.

Watercolour 1 day workshop Friday the 6th of April 2018

This workshop was aimed at suggestion and simplification of value mass, that is to say, we were painting the colour and tonal shapes, which in this case was the shape of the shadows rather than painting all of the interior of the sabastopol goose.
The object of this approach was to create visual poetry rather than prose, that is not describing every detail, and leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps.



We did 2 paintings today, not all completed, but the object was to copy my own example below to start with, to try to consolidate what we knew about value mass, then by working from a photograph on the 2nd goose to work out our own value mass.
we started this by








We started by working on a thumbnail sketch, and blocking in the shadow tonal shapes…the value mass👆
Once we had clearly identified the areas we were going to paint, we had a practice at very quick washes that were not overworked, as this image required a fresh crisp approach.

This is the actual photograph of the goose, there is a lot of detail in here, and it would be very easy to try to do all the detail, which is not wrong, but for this approach..poetry not prose
It's easier to see the simple areas of value mass when you reduce your image to black and white, bump up the contrast and darken it down

To paint the larger areas in shadow all in 1 wash, we didn't need to work quickly to keep this complex area surface water consistent, we just made sure to keep wetting every area that looked like it was drying, either with water or pigment, but a clear wash was first required within the mass area.

The 2nd goose was painted with safety wheels off! This was a chance for the students to demonstrate they had been listening, and I was very pleased that they did, they repeated the whole process, but this time making their own decisions about what to include and what to eliminate, this wasn't easy, and it helped to have the black and white version at hand







The above are some results from todays workshop, which are not all completed, but the students could take their reference home, and with these notes complete them at home and have another go
Some students said they would like to have put more detail on their geese, so I added a few more details to my demonstration today👆and of course it is possible to continue adding layers of detail wet in wet, to wet on dry once one layer has completely dried,

This workshop was for mixed ability, and an improver level student did this same exercise, but with a daffodil instead, like a previous class in Lundy Green.



I wish my students luck with this at home, and look forwards to to teaching the next workshop on Friday the 4th of May 2018