Painting in Layers
I had grand plans for all that I would paint this summer, but instead I found myself struggling again and again with some of the new techniques I've been trying to learn. I did feel I made a bit of a breakthrough with this one, though. This time I think I finally learned the importance of painting in layers from light to dark throughout the whole painting.
I've been watching videos of Andy Evansen, one of my favorite watercolorists, and he recommends doing value studies where you organize your painting into three general values: lights, middle values, and darks. When you paint the light layer, he thinks, your only goal should be to lay down the lightest values of your painting; same goes with the middle value layer. He thinks it's best to paint these two value layers of the whole painting in one go because then you can paint the connections between shapes, and you can let one color merge into the next and get those beautiful, interesting effects that can make watercolor so magical. When you add the final layer of darks, is when you make strong separations between shapes. If there are not enough soft edges and merging colors in the under layers, however, the whole painting will have too many hard separations.
I found myself trying to follow this advice but then departing from the value layers for one reason or another. Usually it would start by my wanting to drop in darker values into a wet middle value to achieve a soft edge, but then I'd end up losing my way as I'd end up working from light to dark on isolated bits. I think I'm finally learning that you really have to trust the process and not worry if the first two layers don't look that great. With these hydrangeas, I really treated the leaves middle values of the leaves as one wash and freely let myself vary the colors. When I came back with the darks, I was able to define the shapes and shadows on top of already interesting color changes. Good--another step forward in understanding what makes a painting work.
Thanks to Shari Blaukopf's demo of hydrangeas in her Sketching Fresh Flowers class. I used the same palette as she did but used a photo of my neighbor's hydrangeas as a reference. Someday someone is bound to chase me out of his or her yard because I'm developing a terrible habit of collecting reference material in other people's front lawns.
