The Purpose of this Blog

Although this may seem like a New Year's challenge, it's not. I just happened to come up with it right after the new year. In short, I decided to follow along with the various exercises in The Big Book of Painting Nature in Watercolor in an effort to improve my painting skills. Although I do paint quite a few things besides landscapes, many of my subjects involve nature.

The reason I'm using a blog for this exercise is: 1) to have an excuse to document what I'm learning as I complete the exercises, and 2) to provide a place for others who wish to use this book for a similar purpose, to share their discoveries for mutual insight and learning.

What This Book Is (and Isn't)

Before inviting folks to join me on this painting journey by following the exercises in The Big Book of Nature Painting in Watercolor, I suppose it would be a good idea to describe the book and what the exercises will and will not include.

This book is not, in my opinion (IMO) intended for beginning beginner watercolorists as it assumes terminology and skills with which a novice painter may be unfamiliar. It's more appropriate for advanced beginners, like me, up to experienced painters who want to improve their method of painting various aspects of nature.

The book focuses on specific aspects of painting nature, namely: trees, skies, and water, However, there are additional aspects covered within these areas such as painting snow or "painting a white bird set against light water and waves," both under the water topic. (If you do not have the book, you may want to check the "look inside" feature at Amazon for the TOC which describes specific subjects.

Every chapter has the same format. It begins with a photo relevant to the subject (trees, skies, or water) and then discusses the artistic problem found in the photo along with the strategy to overcome that problem--the solution. It then proceeds to explain, step-by-step, how this solution is implemented along with photos of each step.

What the book does NOT discuss is composition; it is strictly focused on techniques that may be used to tackle aspects found in nature painting. Each finished painting includes the subjects in the lesson photograph, literally, which many, many art instructors strongly advise against. Composition, IMO, is even more important than technique when it comes to capturing a viewer's attention. However, that is not what this book is about. Think technique, technique, technique regarding nature elements, and you've got the idea. For some this may be a deficit but for those floundering when confronted with a certain type of sky or tree, etc., the book is a welcome aid.

Even though lessons are in step-by-step format, steps fail to include details that might cause frustration, especially to less experienced painters. For example, this is a "Step Three" for a lesson on "Making Sense of Distant Masses of Color" (under "Trees"):

While the paper is drying, start adding definite shapes to the red and oranges. If necessary, rewet some areas and then blend the colors together; this procedure is used here in the lower left corner. When the paper has dried, begin adding the dark green trees. Give their shapes some definition.

 Because the book is organized around topics rather than skill level, it's easy for someone to jump in and join me in doing the exercises at any point. I'll be posting my experience performing each exercise as well as my resulting painting, and hope that you'll do the same thing. So, without further ado...

Dry Brush Techniques

The next set of preparatory exercises consisted of using a "dry brush" technique. Here is the first example from the book. While I do like the look of this, I wondered why the author had used a dry brush (aka not very "juicy" or without much wet paint on the brush) on the grasses rather than a fan brush, which is made for painting grasses like this. But no matter, I went ahead and followed the directions.

Here is mine. Note that, being one to resist following directions to the letter, just on principle, I added in some sky, also using a dry brush. I like the example a lot better but think I kind of got the idea. Except that adding in the sky, also using a dry brush, didn't help the eye any in making a nice, smooth path through the subject matter. Ok, so let's not do that again!

 

A few more scenes to try using the dry brush technique.

 And here are my efforts to replicate the result. I didn't have as much luck with the puddles on the road and am not quite sure why, but not too bad, although I'm also not too keen on the way I've let the road fade off into the distance. Needed to include less of it. Make a note of that!

 The rocks may be my best attempt, although I did cheat just a bit in adding in some dark areas in order to separate the rocks from each other. I think I did improve from the first to the last of these paintings, if marginally.

Learning: Stick with fan brushes for grasses and practice on some scrap paper to make sure I've got the right amount of "dryness" on the brush before starting on the actual areas where I'll be using it.

How about you? Not meaning your efforts at the book's examples, but in using a dry brush effect in your watercolors. What's been your experience?

More on Painting Wet-on-Wet

As I was completing the wet-on-wet exercises, I discovered a very important fact:

Learning: The amount of fuzziness depends not just on the amount of paint "juiciness," but the time between wetting the paper and applying paint to it.

I carried out a little experiment, using the same color and the same paint wetness, I applied the paint at 30 second intervals beginning right after I had thoroughly wet the paper with clear water until 4 minutes and 30 seconds afterwards. You can see the amount of diffusion of the paint on the paper as it began to dry.

As you can see, there is very little spreading after 2 minutes, 30 seconds. You may want to conduct a similar test because you might wet the paper with more or less water than I did and may use more or less"juicy" paint. The paper you use may also change the rate of drying. 

Just remember that the amount of time between wetting the paper and applying paint will yield different "loose edges." The more you know about how slow or fast to paint on wet paper to achieve desired results, the more control you will have!

Painting Wet-on-Wet

After learning about painting on dry paper (which I need much more practice doing in order to achieve a smooth effect), the next exercise involved painting with wet paint on wet paper. This method is called painting "wet-on-wet." In addition to painting on a clear wet surface, the method also applies to adding paint to any already wet painted surface.

The exercise involved painting a snowy wood with all wet surfaces. This is the image of the painting from the book. Note that all the edges are very soft.

The goal here was to paint the entire scene on wet paper. A point made was that it is sometimes useful to soak the paper for hours or even overnight and then to let the surface moisture evaporate before applying paint. I am guessing that this is the method the authors used as even if the paper was thoroughly wetted, it would dry too much to complete the entire painting wet-on-wet. Since I didn't soak the paper, I ended up doing a combination of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry or nearly dry. This is how my painting turned out.

While most of the edges are fairly soft, as are most of the shadows, I ended up using some wet on dry as the paper began to dry too quickly. I would have either needed to keep wetting the paper with clear water (a hassle), or soaking it, in order to have the whole thing reflect a true wet-on-wet appearance. I'm also not sure I would have liked the result more than a mixture of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry--especially for a painting with a limited color palette like this one. There wouldn't have been enough variety. I think the combination of hard and soft edges makes it a bit more interesting. This painting certainly isn't especially noteworthy, but it is pleasing in its simplicity.

Learning: If you want to do a painting entirely in a wet-on-wet style, it's best to soak the paper instead of just applying a good wetting to it. A combination of soft and hard edges may make a painting more interesting than either all one or the other.

Wet on Dry Painting

Since I already had most of the colors the author recommended, I created several new palettes (using those cheap, round 10-well palettes) with the prescribed colors so that I had a better chance of approximating the results that the author achieved. You may or may not decide to do the same.

Before getting into the first section on trees, the book (pp, 22 - 27) discusses two of the major ways of putting paint onto paper: the wet on dry and the wet-on-wet methods. I have typically had a very tough time getting large smooth areas of color when using the wet on dry method, whereby I used wet paint on my brush on dry watercolor paper. This was so troublesome for me that I tend to avoid this method for larger areas like skies. However, I followed the instructions on p. 22 and didn't do too badly. However, I also found that I'd made rather a mess of the rest of the painting (for which there were no directions), so did another version, since it was a simple composition.

Here is the painting used as an illustration for this wet on dry technique.

When I looked at this painting, I figured that the artist had used the blue in the sky down to the ground, using additional washes, putting more green into the blue. This is how I painted my first version.

While the sky isn't too bad, I think I tried to add the next wash for the mountain and the trees, before the previous one had dried. And the splotchiness is what happened. Nor was I able to fix it which is my main reason for doing another version.

LEARNING: Either wait until the paper is completely dry before adding another wash on top of it OR be sure the initial paint is still wet enough to allow additional color to be dropped into it. 

In this case, given the shape of the mountains and the trees, I think I should have waited until the initial blue wash had completely dried. Here is my second attempt. In this one I only took the blue of the sky down to the mountain and then stopped, let it dry, then added the trees after the mountain had dried. Although this is not what I suspect the author wanted, I felt more confidant painting this way.

Although not as smooth as the book's version, both the mountain and the trees are better than in the first version, as are the rest of the elements in this painting, and am much happier with it. I have to say that the color scheme here is quite interesting. I don't think I would have thought of it on my own.

I felt confidant that I knew how to create a varigated wash so skipped the exercise on pp. 24 & 25.