PAINTING TIPS

WATERCOLOUR TIPS FOR

BEGINNERS

Working with watercolour may at first seem strange and difficult, especially if you are use to opaque mediums such as oil or acrylic. The first and most obvious difference is the fact that watercolour is transparent. This means you must decide from the very beginning where the areas of white will be in your painting.

The process for successful watercolour painting, is to avoid the areas to be left white and apply the lightest washes first, gradually working your way towards darker washes. Try to cover large areas fairly loosely in the early stages of the painting, applying tighter detail towards the end. Here are a few points to keep in mind...

THUMBNAILS Small thumbnail sketches allow you to shuffle your subject around and adjust the composition before you start to paint. Having a plan to work to makes it much easier to avoid problems, particularly when it comes to arranging tonal (light dark) contrast. Break your thumbnail sketches into about four different tonal areas and shade them in.

This lets you manipulate the lights and darks so the maximum contrast occurs at the centre of interest. this sketch contains only four different tones (black, dark. grey, light.grey, white) COLOUR HARMONY There are a few things to remember to maintain colour harmony throughout your painting.

Limit your palette Dipping into twenty different colours spread around your palette is tempting but usually results in a discordant, muddy work. Limit your colours to just two or three, particularly in the early stages of a painting. Your subject will dictate which ones to choose. I find for buildings, landscape etc. starting with washes of earth colours - Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna plus a little Ultramarine or Indigo, depending on what sort of atmosphere you’re after, gives a tight harmonious foundation to work on.

More intense colours can be carefully introduced later if necessary. Foreign colours How often do you look at a painting and see an area of colour that doesn’t seem to fit? A group of trees in an out of place green, a discordant blue river or a purple flower that seems to jump out of the bunch.

The remedy to this problem is simple, introduce more of the discordant colour to the rest of the painting. Darks Avoid neutral darks - a painting will have more life and character if the darks tend to either warm or cool. To mix a rich strong dark don’t use an opaque Yellow. Windsor & Newton Quinacridone Gold or Rowney Indian Yellow work best. Most other yellows make muddy darks

CENTRE OF INTEREST For a painting to be successful the centre of interest should be obvious and well positioned. Avoid placing the centre of interest in the middle of a painting (either horizontally or vertically) unless you are after a static, formal composition. Keeping the centre of interest an unequal distance from each side helps position it correctly. Breaking the horizontal and vertical axis roughly in the ratio of 1:2 will also help to place the centre of interest

COLOUR THEORY

Mixing vs Buying Ready-Made Colours Colour mixing gives you a range of colours with a minimum number of tubes of paint (very useful when painting outside your studio). If you're using a lot of a certain colour, you'll probably decide it's easier to buy it in a tube rather than mix it up again and again. But you'll find that there'll always be an instance when the colour you want simply doesn't come ready-made, such as a particular green in a landscape.

Your knowledge of colour mixing will enable you to adapt a ready-made green to the shade you require. In colour mixing for painting, the fundamental rule is that there are three colours that cannot be made by mixing other colours together.

These three, red, blue, and yellow, are known as the primary colours.

What Happens When You Mix Primary Colours? If you mix two primary colours together, you create what is called a secondary colour. Mixing blue and red creates purple; red and yellow make orange; yellow and blue make green. The exact hue of the secondary colour you've mixed depends on which red, blue, or yellow you use and the proportions in which you mix them.

If you mix three primary colours together, you get a tertiary colour. How Much of Each Primary Colour Do I Use? The proportions in which you mix the two primaries is important. If you add more of one than the other, the secondary colour will reflect this. For example, if you add more red than yellow, you end up with a strong, reddish orange; if you add more yellow than red, you produce a yellowish orange. Experiment with all the colours you have - and keep a record of what you've done.

Why are Complementary Colours Important in Colour Theory? When placed next to each other, complementary colours make each other appear brighter, more intense. The shadow of an object will also contain its complementary colour, for example the shadow of a green apple will contain some red. The complementary colour of a primary colour (red, blue, or yellow) is the colour you get by mixing the other two primary colours. So the complementary colour of red is green, of blue is orange, and of yellow is purple. The complementary of a secondary colour is the primary colour that wasn't used to make it. So the complementary colour of green is red, of orange is blue, and of purple is yellow. Tertiary Colours Neutral colours, such as browns and greys, contain all three primary colours. They're created by mixing either all three primary colours or a primary and secondary colour (secondary colours of course being made from two primaries). By varying the proportions of the colours you're mixing, you create the different tertiary colours. You can also mix blue with an earth colour, such as raw umber or burnt sienna. Of course with watercolour you don't have white paint; to lighten a grey you add more water instead of white, but remember the grey will be lighter when it dries. Tertiary colours are neutrals such as browns and greys.

Why Do My Tertiary Colours Keep Turning Out Muddy? If you mix too many colours together, you'll get mud. If your grey or brown isn't coming out the way you want it to, rather start again than add more colour in the hope it'll work. What's the Easiest Way to Mix a Brown? Mix a primary colour with its complementary colour. So add orange to blue, purple to yellow, or green to red. Each of these makes a different brown, so once again make up a colour chart to give you a quick reference to refer to.

What's the Easiest Way to Mix a Gray? Mix some orange (or yellow and red) with a blue then add some white. You'll always want more blue than orange, but experiment with the amount of white you use. How to make colours darker/lighter? While it may seem logical that to lighten a colour you add white to it and that to darken it you add black, this is an oversimplification. White reduces brightness so although it makes a colour lighter, it removes its vibrancy. Black doesn't so much add darkness as create murkiness (though there are instances in which black is uniquely useful, such as the range of greens it can produce when mixed with yellow!).

Why Can't I Add White to Lighten a Colour? Adding white to a colour produces a tint of that colour, makes a transparent colour (such as ultramarine) opaque, and cools the colour. This is most noticeable with red, which changes from a warm red into a cool pink. You can add white to lighten a colour, but because this removes the vibrancy of a colour you'll end up with a washed-out picture if you use white to lighten all you colours. Rather develop your colour mixing skills to produce hues of varying intensity. For example, to lighten a red, add some yellow instead than white. Watercolour paints are, of course, transparent, so to lighten you simply add more water to paint to let the white of the paper shine through.

Why Can't I Add Black to Darken a Colour? Black tends to dirty colours rather than simply darken them. Of the most common blacks, Mars black is the blackest and is very opaque, ivory black has a brown undertone, and lamp black a blue undertone.

Colour Mixing Tip No 1: Add Dark to Light It takes only a little of a dark colour to change a light colour, but it takes considerably more of a light colour to change a dark one. So, for example, always add blue to white to darken it, rather than trying to lighten the blue by adding white.

Colour Mixing Tip No 2: Mixing the Perfect Browns and Greys Mix ‘ideal’ browns and greys that harmonise with a painting by creating them from complementary colours (red/green; yellow/purple; blue/orange) in the palette you’ve used in that painting, rather than colours you haven’t used. Varying the proportions of each colour will create quite a range.

Colour Mixing Tip No 3: Don’t Over mix If, when you mix two colours together on a palette, you don’t mix and mix until they’re totally, utterly, definitely combined, but stop a little bit beforehand, you get a far more interesting result when you put the mixed colour down on paper or canvas. The result is a colour that’s intriguing, varies slightly across the area you’ve applied it, not flat and consistent.