Powerful Watercolor Landscapes: Tools for Painting with Impact
Catherine Gill
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 1600619495
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Banish boring watercolors forever! This guide gives you the "power tools" you need to transform dull, flat landscapes into robust, colorful expressions of your artistic vision. Each chapter focuses on a specific strategy for tackling tough challenges, complete with inspiring examples, hands-on demonstrations and instructional diagrams to make these strategies easy and fun to learn. Following this guide's masterful visual instruction, you'll learn how to:
- See beyond "what you see" to develop strong foundations in every composition
- Avoid repainting, overworking and frustration by focusing on a composition's unifying elements
- Become decisive with your values for heightened interest and impact
- Quickly and easily mix a huge range of clean, rich colors—including vibrant grays and greens—with no more mud!
- Put it all together following detailed step-by-step demonstrations of complete paintings from start to finish
Whether you're new to watercolor painting or not, this guide will empower you to push shape and color into exciting new territory. Experience the satisfaction of painting with "power tools" and enjoy immediate results in your work.
Classical Painting Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice
Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time
Powerful Watercolor Landscapes: Tools for Painting with Impact
Get Started Painting: Learn to Paint Step by Step in Watercolor, Acrylic, Oil, and Pastel
Solving the Mystery in Watercolor
Watercolor | 11" × 15" (28cm × 38cm) Collection of Steve and JoAnn Trick 43 Z6132i 042-055 C3.indd 43 9/29/10 3:12:34 PM HOW TO CREATE DOMINANCE Creating dominance is quite easy: create inequalities. To create a dominant color, paint more area of the painting in that color than in other colors. When drawing two rocks, draw one rock bigger than the other, creating a dominant rock and a subordinate rock. While you’re at it, make the negative spaces between the rocks unequal, too. Turn the
one closest to blue is cooler. Primary and Secondary Hues Light direction arrow RED Violet Shade side Orange Light side BLUE YELLOW Cast shadow Green A simple color wheel Keep a simple color wheel handy for finding complements and judging intervals between warm and cool. Better yet, memorize it—one less thing to carry. 116 The effect of light: sun side, shade side and cast shadow Colors on the sun side will be warmer and lighter in value than those on the out-of-light, cool side. The
transparent, opaque and staining. Transparents easily make light values because they let so much of the white of the paper show through. Opaques are thick and cover the paper, blocking some light, so they produce middle values. Staining watercolors stain the paper fiber, making dark values. Dark Value Staining Yogurt Match pigment to value On your palette, choose the right pigment for the value you want. If you want a light value, choose a transparent pigment. For a middle value, choose an
da Vinci spent most of his days close to the land. These days we race by in our cars, only glancing, barely taking in what we see. Standing in a landscape for several hours is a rare thing for people to do. It is a privilege of the landscape painter to do that rare thing, to observe the landscape, to hold a conversation with it, to capture a bit of it on paper. Take your brush for a walk. You will receive in return a treasure beyond price. 156 Learn more at
and before long you have a clear, Select one photograph or location and practice four “whats” strong painting. As long as you let the “what” govern your decisions, you’ll play a power game. You’ll build your game enormously every time you try this. You’ll practice decision-making, gain skill in orchestrating the painting by using your “what” to direct your team, and develop a playful way to build a center of interest. It’s a dynamic process that you learn by doing. Often a landscape has an