Polperro Cottages

Polperro Cottages
Watercolour on Paper
15.5cm x 23.5cm (6" x 9.25")

Last summer, Elaine, Doris and I spent a few days in Talland Bay, Cornwall to celebrate my birthday. It's a short walk along the costal path to Polperro in one direction and Looe in the other.

We all enjoyed the walk to and from Polperro, but our walk to Looe was less successful. It was a scorching hot day and Doris insisted on a taxi ride home (see Holiday Sketches).

Polperro is photogenic, but my photos didn't capture exactly what I wanted to paint. Some 7cm x 10cm thumbnails helped to explore and improve a composition. The initial pencil thumbnail was useful for deciding on the placement and configuration of shapes. It would have been handy if it had also given a definitive statement about dark, light and mid-toned shapes (see John Lovett - Thumbnail Sketches). I will include a 3 value tonal study when I next use thumbnails.

Polperro Cottages  – 7cm x 10cm (2.75" x 4") Thumbnail Sketches
Pencil and Watercolour on Paper
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook

The painting respects the spirit of the thumbnails except for the colour of the water. I prefer the turquoise in the second thumbnail, but if I try to adjust the painting, there is a chance I will spoil the reflections, so I will stick with what I have.

Happy Christmas 2022

 

Snowy Christmas Tree
Watercolour on Paper
26cm x 15cm (10.25" x 6")

Wishing You Peace and Happiness for Christmas and the New Year

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Monochrome Study

Moorings on the Dart
Monochrome Study - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Watercolour on Paper
16.5cm x 24cm (6.5" x 9.5")

Chapter 7 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about painting. Philip provides an introduction to a variety of media and techniques. The first is watercolour which he suggests is a big mistake for beginners because:

Watercolour is the most difficult painting medium to use well as it is unforgiving, allowing you little room for error.

He also points out:

It is a good idea to create a crisp linear drawing to establish the placement of the key elements of the landscape. 

This advice made me realise I’ve let my drawing practice slip and I need to do something about it.

Lesson 35 is a monochrome study in watercolour. Phillip recommends monochromes as a way to get started with watercolour while avoiding the additional complexity of having to think about colour.

The exercise is similar to Lesson 18 Wash Media, but in watercolour instead of ink. It provided an opportunity to experiment with the composition and approach for two pictures I am planning to paint. In both of them, I overdid the masking fluid and applied it too clumsily – lesson learnt.

The study of the boats on the Dart helped me to work out how to build up the layers of the landscape and how to paint the distant background..

Tree Tunnel - Westonbirt
Monochrome Study - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Watercolour on Paper
16.5cm x 24cm (6.5" x 9.5")

I wasn’t sure the tree tunnel would work without a lot of painstaking detail. The monochrome has persuaded me it will

Aged Fencing

Aged Fencing
Watercolour on Paper
24.5cm x 15.5cm (9.75" x 6")

Aged Fencing is the fourth topic in the Wood Grain Patterns chapter of  Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice. 

You can see the preparation for this and the first step of the paining in Thumbnail Sketches and A Fuzzy Background.

Decaying Fencing

The fence post in the main reference photo wasn’t as old as I wanted, so I enhanced it with some elements from this one. Combining bits from multiple images is an important part of painting from photographs.

A Fuzzy Background

Aged Fencing - A Fuzzy Background - 26.5cm x 19cm (10.5" x 7.5")
Watercolour on Paper

Claudia Nice uses soft focus backgrounds for both her examples from the Aged Fencing topic in Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor.

This type of background is usually painted wet-on-wet. The challenge is if you try to paint around the foreground shapes, it is difficult to create a cohesive backdrop. Some people can do this, but I’ve ended up with sections that look like they come from different paintings. 

A popular solution is to mask the foreground shapes so you can paint over them. Recently, Steve Mitchell (the Mind of Watercolor) demonstrated how he does this with a combination of masking tape and masking fluid (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTpTZUZ_PA8&t=295s)

The technique worked well for Steve, so I gave it a go. I scaled up the thumbnail from the top of Thumbnail Sketches, masked off the stile, fence and some foreground foliage, so it looked like this.

Aged Fencing - All Masked Up - 26.5cm x 19cm (10.5" x 7.5")

Once the masking fluid was dry, I painted the background over it, left it to dry and then removed the masking to leave the slightly fuzzy setting for the fence - all I have to do now is paint the difficult stuff. 

Thumbnail Sketches

Aged Fencing - Preliminary Thumbnail Sketch - 15cm x 10cm (6" x 4")
Ink and Pencil on Paper
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook

Many art teachers and authors stress the importance of using quick thumbnail sketches to check and improve a composition before investing too much time and material in a painting that is doomed to fail – (see John Lovett - Thumbnail Sketches).

I used this approach recently while preparing for the Aged Fencing topic in Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice.

Over the summer, I collected a load of reference photos while out walking with Elaine and Doris. 

Aged Fencing

This stile has the makings of an interesting subject, but the composition can probably be improved. I drew a couple of simple thumbnails to explore some ideas using a rectangle with the same proportion as the paper I will paint on. 

Aged Fencing - Preliminary Thumbnail Sketch - 7.5cm x 5cm (3" x 2")
Ink on Paper
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook

Thumbnail sketches are also a good way to find the challenges in the drawing. These highlighted the importance of perspective on the step. If the step is out of whack, it upsets the whole picture.

I drew the slightly larger version at the top of the page to finalize the composition and to think about the tones in the picture. I will do a couple of simple colour studies before starting to paint.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Format

Composition for Parkmill Pond (1:2)

Lesson 34 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is a the last lesson in the chapter on Composition. Phillip starts by pointing out:

Changing the format of your image can have a profound impact on your work.

He urges:

Don’t fall into the trap of complacency, stretch yourself, challenge how you approach the composition of the landscape.

He goes on to suggest a number of ways to train your compositional muscles, but doesn’t suggest a specific exercise. One of his first suggestions is to cut up an image so you can see all the positive and negative shapes because:

Often, good composition is a way of ensuring that each shape in your image is interesting and different, yet their overall effect is to create harmony through the opposition of different forces.

As an exercise I decided to break a photo into shapes and use them as the basis for a composition.

Parkmill Pond, Woodchester Park

This is Parkmill Pond in Woodchester Park.

Parkmill Pond (17 Shapes)

My first attempt at identifying shapes, resulted in 17 shapes. The frilly foreground overlaps the objects behind it, dividing them into multiple small shapes. This is too many - Tom Hoffman suggests a maximum of 10 shapes in the Five-Value Monochrome Study from his Watercolor-Painting. 

Parkmill Pond (10 Shapes)

Simplifying the foreground shape, reduces the overall shape count to 10. I plan to paint the foreground grasses overlapping the water, but these are adornments. The "bulk" of the foreground shape is the simpler object in this second picture.

Parkmill Pond - Separating the Shapes

Separating the shapes shows they are interesting and varied, but they are predominately horizontal - they don't provide any contrast between horizontal and vertical. My plan is this tension will come from the rendering of the shapes. There will be lots of vertical lines to suggest the textures in the grasses, trees and reflections.

After identifying the shapes, the next step was to answer two compositional questions:

• What format to use for the picture?
• What is the focus / centre of interest?

Towards the end of the lesson, Phillip suggests:

By limiting yourself, maybe to a particular format or a particular use of media, you can begin to clarify your intention, to know what you want to say.

My initial format choice was 7 by 10 because I paint in water-based media (watercolour, acrylic and gouache) and I have two Arches watercolour blocks (a small and a large one) both with proportions of 7 by 10.

What is the centre of interest? There is a tower (“The Tower”) tucked away in the background trees, but this is a painting about the lake, so the patch of bright water towards the rear of the lake makes a good focal point.

I investigated a number of ways to resize the image to 7 by 10:

• Just squashing it all in
• Various zooms and crops

I also explored the position of the bright patch of water using a rule of thirds grid and a phi grid (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Rule of Thirds)

Composition for Parkmill Pond (7:10)

After a bit of tinkering, this is the result. I prefer the 1 by 2 version at the top of the post. There are some landscapes, probably those with mainly horizontal shapes, that I think look better in a more panoramic format. I've decided to limit myself to 3 formats for watercolour paintings: 7:10, 1:1 and 1:2. I chose 1:1 and 1:2 because they are simple to measure and they seem to work well for some subjects (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Root Rectangles).