Learning to Love Greens!

I remember when I first started painting, I told someone that I really did not like painting trees and rocks. The response was "you live in Maine! You are in big trouble!"

Almost every green pigment that you purchase or any green mixture that you make yourself will require a tiny bit of red or rose in order to make it look natural. Just try it.

Greens found in the landscape are often more "neutral" than they are painted.

Here's a suggestion: set aside an hour three times a week. Mix each of your blues with one yellow (i.e. use cobalt, ultramarine, cerulean, phtyalo and aureolin yellow). Make a 3" square. Label each one. Then, change the yellow (i.e. cadmium yellow) and then continue through each of your yellows, and using the same blues, mix new greens. Be sure to lable each one.

Next, try each of these mixtures with a touch of one of your reds and see what results. 

You can also take each of your tube greens and modifiy each with a bit of your reds or roses in the same way. Adding a little rose madder will give you a very different result than using cadmium red or alizarin crimson.

If you label each mixture, you will have quite a library of greens to use in your next painting.

This sounds like a lot of work, but I can promise you that it really doesn't take that long!

 

This plein air painting was done over a period of four mornings as the light and shadows changed by 9:30 am.   

Notice the variety of warm and cool greens in this painting

Let's Begin with the Greens that are Far Away

We know that cooler colors will stay back while warm colors come forward.

(there are exceptions to everything, but as a general rule, this works).

So in order to set the stage, I mixed some cool greens using aureolin yellow and cerulean blue, as well as viridian plus a bit of aureolin and a wee touch of permanent rose and cobalt blue. By varying the amount of yellow and red you can get several varieties of green. Just remember to keep them "cool" so don't add too much yellow.

The sky began with cobalt blue graded to cooler cerulean and then to naples yellow behind the trees.

Look at the pale cool greens that were painted into a sky wash that was still damp.  

I think you can see the progression of cool to warmer greens as the trees came from far away to nearer to my line of vision.

The sun-lit grass area by the gate was very bright and was painted as a warm yellow-green. Varying amounts of green and blue were added as I painted into the shadowed areas.

The dark cyprus trees also included some warm and cool variations. Always observe the angle of light; it will help create the dimensional form of the tree.

We have barely scratched the surface of all the ideas and ways to make greens a beautiful part of our paintings. But progress begins with small steps and I know that just having a "vocabulary" of three warm and three cool greens as well as some complimentary shadow colors will make a world of difference in your paintings.

I Had No Idea How To Paint This!

I saw a photograph of my brother's  three year old granddaughter on Facebook. She was sitting on the edge of the stage at her ballet class recital in her pink tulle tutu. But dear me! She was not happy....if this had been a pretty little picture of her, I would have thought "how cute" and that would have been the end of it.

But - she was pouting; it was a dark photo and I was quite fascinated with the idea of painting her in this setting.

Here is the reference photograph. I lightened the photo on Photoshop which helped a little as her features were not clear. I felt that I did get a likeness in my drawing and most importantly, the posture that appealed to me so much in the original photograph. 

As I was drawing this little figure, I began to think about how I could achieve the look of the filmy tulle and also see her plump little legs under the tulle.  

The more complete the drawing became - the less I felt I knew how to proceed.  

I told myself "it's just value and edges".  

Have you heard this before?

  

It didn't help.

So - I took my own advice and did a study.   The minute I started this, I knew that yes, it truly was values and edges. The folds of the tulle were graded washes. I changed the temperature from warm to cool as the fold turned into the shadow. Edges that turned away were softened.

The next two studies gave me the confidence that I needed to start that large stretched paper.   I made the value of her legs a bit darker under the tulle than they were in the light, and then lifted out the light lines. I left the green ribbon as the white of the paper until I had completed the skirt.

 I painted all of the background first. This allowed me to paint her hair into the dark and then lift out wispy hairs that gave her head an "airy' feeling.
I painted the warm colors in her hair so that they would show as "highlights" against her dark hair

Here you can see how the change of values gives depth and puts the underskirt behind the tulle. This effect is enhanced by wet in wet painting where I charged different roses and also a darker

neutral into the pink skirt 

 .

"Reluctant Ballerina"   I spent a day adjusting the values of the shadowed areas on her bodice, the dark background and I can't tell you how many times I touched her lower lip with rose! It just disappeared time after time. Finally used a bit of quinacridone rose and that worked.

I hope that this may prove helpful to you as you work through ways to achieve specific effects with your paintings.

What worked for me was being clear about what I was trying to do (create the look of crispy tulle over soft flesh) and then ask yourself what you know how to do that will make that effect possible.

You've heard me say that "naming it makes it possible". I am more convinced of that every single day.           

The World of Watercolour Competition - passed the first selection stage!

I think you can imagine how thrilled I am to find that one of my two paintings "Tea And Sushi" and "Exuberance" that I submitted has passed the first selection stage of this amazing world wide competition that has been created by the finest watercolor magazine in the world, "The Art of Watercolour" which is published in France and distributed world-wide. Nearly 2000 artists from all over the world submitted two paintings each.

Here is the link if you would like to see the magazine issue which featured my still life paintings in September 2013.  http://issuu.com/diverti/docs/taw12 .You will see that this is a highlight of their next three months of writing and programming - sadly you can only see the table of contents without buying the magazine -but I am on page 88 and I'd be happy to show it to you when you visit my studio.

I've just received the latest issue and my name was among several of the ones published out of the artists who have moved to the next phase of selection. Being included with this group of the top watercolor artists in the world is an incredible honor and I am just about as happy as I can be!.Here is "Tea And Sushi" which won the Daniel Smith award in the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour in Toronto last year.

Please stay "tuned" for news on the next step in the selection process.

Flower Power is Finished!

When I left you last, I had written about my second attempt at this painting. I hope my experience working through this will be helpful to you as you paint in your own space.

I was somewhat happy with my second attempt, but it was still not what I hoped for. This time I cut a 34 x 38" piece of hot press paper, taped a nice wide border around it and started all over again.

First of all, I masked out each of the flowers, and spattered some maskoid on the background. I wanted a variety of sizes of spatter so I used different size brushes, and changed the direction of the way I held the brush so that the spatter would make an interesting pattern.

Once the spattering was dry, I painted the figure using all watercolor (no fluid acrylics); instead of realistic colors for her hair, I used sienna, violet, mauve, brown, and green.

 I knew that

I would be able to drop in all of my spring greens on the background and let them mingle on the paper; by adding more pigment and drops of water, I could create lots of blooms and run-backs, which is just what I wanted.
 (I know, usually in watercolor,

these are the very things we try to avoid!)

After the background was dry, I removed the mask on the all the spatters, and the flowers. The final step was painting the flowers. BUT, after finishing the flowers, I decided that I wanted to darken the value of the background, especially on the left side of the figure.
So, I repainted the whole left side, painting around each flower.

 Once it was all dry, the last thing was spattering some opaque white on the background. These little spatters added additional sparkle to the painting.

Flower Power

I am happy with this painting as it really expresses my feelings.
It's a far cry from the photo and definitely a giant leap from my first attempt.

I am sharing this with you in the hope that it will be an encouragement to you. There are times when we just have to persevere until we accomplish what we are dreaming of.

In my next post, I'll share some ways that I make decisions about making changes in a painting without having to make corrections on the paper.

Until then, happy painting! 

If you have questions, or comments, please do leave them here; I'd love to hear from you!

Flower Power - Finished!!

When I left you last time, i had just completed my second attempt at this painting. I hope that my experience with this image will be helpful to you as you work through your own paintings.

 

I was somewhat happy with my second attempt, but it was still not what I hoped for. This time I cut a 34 x 38" piece of hot press paper, taped a nice wide border around it and started all over again.

First of all, I masked out each of the flowers, and spattered some maskoid on the background. I wanted a variety of sizes of spatter so I used different size brushes, and changed the direction of the way I held the brush so that the spatter would make an interesting pattern.

Once the spattering was dry, I painted the figure using all watercolor (no fluid acrylics); instead of realistic colors for her hair, I used sienna, violet, mauve, brown, and green.

 I knew that

I would be able to drop in all of my spring greens on the background and let them mingle on the paper; by adding more pigment and drops of water, I could create lots of blooms and run-backs, which is just what I wanted.
 (I know, usually in watercolor, these are the very things we try to avoid!)

 

Flower Power

I am happy with this painting as it really expresses my feelings.
It's a giant leap from the photo and definitely a big improvement  from my first attempt.

I am sharing this with you in the hope that it will be an encouragement to you. There are times when we just have to persevere until we accomplish what we are dreaming of.  It's also so important to know your materials. In this case, it would have been much more difficult to achieve this lively, textured background using cold press paper. It would have been a totally different painting.

In my next post, I'll share some ways that I make decisions about making changes in a painting without having to make corrections on the paper.

Until then, happy painting!

Please leave questions or comments; I'd love to hear from you.