Watercolor Notes Week 2

Our second week in class was great.  We went out on location to a cute little pioneer village created from authentic pioneer homes that have been moved together to create the town.  What a fun spot to try out our first painting!  Here are a couple pointers I picked up for the week:

Setting up your palette 

Setting up a watercolor palette is a very particular assignment- who knew!?  I’m used to working with acrylic paints that you squirt on your palette where ever you want and then clean them all up when you’re done.  But because watercolors are so water soluble you don’t have to worry about them drying up (when they do you just add a little water) so you can squirt your paints in specific wells and keep them there forever.  I actually love it (cleaning up the unused paint at the end of a painting session is my least favorite part of cleaning up).

Here’s an example of how we set up our palette with just our beginner colors- the empty spots were left to use as we buy more colors later on.  The palette is set up by color (if it were full it would look like a rainbow with all the blues together, reds together etc) and then by warmth/cool.  The warmer color is to the right of the cooler color- this allows you to quickly pick up a warm or cool tone when needed instead of needing to step back and think- now, was quinacridone rose the warm one….?

 

Thumbnails and Value Studies

Now, I’ve been through design school so I know all about setting up a page layout with thumbnail sketches, but adding these value studies made the experience something different all together.  First you go through and pick out some places you think might look interesting and you quickly sketch them out into a small area (my teacher had us just trace a credit card to get our thumbnail boxes).  They don’t have to be perfect by any means, just enough to give you a basic layout of your painting.  Then you go in and color all the darkest areas, then the mid-tones and leave the lights white.  You want to make sure that the layout is not only good with the actual objects, but that the layout of the values is balanced and interesting as well.

From those thumbnails you pick your final painting location and make a full page value study.  Basically doing the same thing as in the thumbnail, but you make it larger.  In this case it was just about the size of the final painting.  Because we were working on location we had to be sure the Value Study was detailed enough to paint our final picture.  It was a good thing it was, because the last two days we’d planned to be on location it rained so I ended up painting my entire piece from the value study!