Finding the Connections
One of the ways that I am seeking to grow as a painter this year is by participating in an online course led by Andy Evansen, one of my favorite watercolor artists, called The Art of Watercolor: A Complete Program. I love Andy’s work. If you’ve never checked out his website, do! His paintings are fresh and loose, full of beautiful color choices, interesting and varied yet managing to have the harmonious simplicity of a Japanese Sumi-e painting. He paints mostly rural landscapes from his hometown in Vermillion, MN, not far from where my in-laws live in Wisconsin. As a life-long Midwesterner who spent nearly a decade in Wisconsin, I naturally have an affinity for his subject matter. The trees, hills, water, and fields of that region is the kind of beauty I know and love best. At the heart of Andy’s painting method is the practice of value studies in which you reduce all the values in your reference image to three: light, medium, and dark. When you paint your value study, you let the white of your paper represent your light values. Then you paint your middle values as large, connected middle-value shapes. For example, if you have several middle-value buildings in a row, you don’t separate them in your painting. You paint the shape of the entire row of buildings a midtone gray (minus the light hitting the buildings, which would be left white). Finally, you add the darkest values. The value studies are important for several reasons, and I’ll be exploring them in future posts. The really distinctive way that Andy uses values studies, though, is to help identify where you can let the fluid medium of watercolor shine by allowing the colors to blend and merge into each other using a wet-in-wet technique. When Andy switches from the value study to color, he paints all his light colors together on wet paper. As he is keen to say, “Let the colors fuzz!” After the light wash has dried, he paints the middle values and again allows all the middle value colors to mingle together. To do this, he paints the large middle-value shapes, just as he does in the value study, but now, since there are many color changes within the middle value shapes, he lets the various colors touch each other to create lost edges and a sense of connection between the large shapes of the painting. It is only after the second wash has dried that Andy adds the dark details. The darks provide contrasting hard edges, separate important shapes, and draw the eye to areas of interest within the painting. This method is challenging, and I am learning a lot. Andy thinks that too many watercolorists treat their drawings as coloring books, painting each distinct shape and failing to find the connections between them. (That’s me!) This often results in tight, overly-detailed paintings. Here I did a thumbnail value study of my mother-in-law and my son in her garden. Then I did a thumbnail to test out colors. I was pleased by how well these quick versions turned out. But when I painted the larger painting (see it posted under Paintings), I inadvertently went right back to my old methods of painting too slowly and with too much detail. While the drawing is more carefully done in the larger painting, I ultimately think it lacks the freshness of the thumbnail color study. In any case, I’m looking forward to lots more experimentation and learning.
