10/25/2023 1:15:18 PM
When we moved into our house in Florida in July, I was thrilled to discover many glorious things growing in the backyard. There are banana, lemon, lime, orange, and fig trees! Grapes are vining up the trellis! In addition to the standard plants in a vegetable garden, there is ginger, edamame, and artichoke! I love plants. I love fresh produce. I couldn’t be more enthused. BUT Florida has its own special insects and nematodes and mildews. Florida has different growing seasons. There’s been a lot to learn, and in the time that it has taken to settle and start researching plant life down here, my bananas are being decimated by some unidentified insect, my citrus trees show signs of disease, and two palm trees have utterly dried up and died! When we looked at the house back in June, there were lovely roses growing in the front, but they were gone by the time we moved in July. I had assumed the rose bush was dying, too. But a couple weeks ago, several more roses appeared. Here’s a painting of one of them. This is the first time I’ve tried a quasi- high key painting (i.e., a painting in the light range of the value spectrum). High key paintings inevitably lack strong contrasts, but they can end up with a soft gentleness that I like.
All of this is a prelude to what I really want to talk about, which is backgrounds. The background of a painting is something that almost entirely escaped my attention until I began painting myself. When I lived in Denver and was learning to draw in Ali Ghassan’s atelier, I overheard him say to one of his students that backgrounds can make or break a painting. Nothing could be more true, I’m finding. My favorite painting I ever made was ruined by a bad background, and I have been dissatisfied with many more. The lesson of this rose painting is that simple is often better. Here I just went in with the wash, let it fade to white in places, and called it done.
Here’s a summary of things I’m learning about backgrounds, which I’ll be striving to put into practice in the coming months (or years?):
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A good background needs some variety. A flat wash is boring. The variety of the background should not, however, call attention to itself but should serve to highlight the areas of interest in the painting.
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A background will distract the viewer if it has a lot of value contrasts and hard edges. It’s better to make soft transitions. Wet-in-wet painting is a great technique for backgrounds. This also means, however, that you need to be decisive about how you will paint your background before you start, or it will dry on you and leave streaks and hard edges.
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Since bright colors demand our attention, often a background will distract if it is as high in chroma as the areas of interest in the painting. Duller colors tend to work better. There are exceptions, though. See Van Gogh.
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The background should provide value contrast at the focal point of the painting. If you want to paint the light hitting a white rose, a dark background by the flower’s edge will make the light stand out. Similarly, a dark orchid will be lost if the background is also dark, but a light background will draw the viewer’s eye to the flower.
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One way to provide a subtle variety to the background is to shift the color temperature as you paint. If your background is gray, for example, you can mix up a puddle tending towards blue-gray on one side of the palette and a warm, subtly orange gray on the other. That said, cool colors tend to recede and warmer colors tend to come forward, so be careful with warmth in the background. I have seen many successful paintings with a warm background, but in my experience thus far, a dominantly warm background is more risky, perhaps unless your focal area is cool. I’ll have to experiment with this more and see what I discover.
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Sometimes it’s best to make a background color using the pigments already on your palette. Mix them up (but not wholly, so you still have a variety of color) and, if you’re going for a light background, add lots of water. Mixing the paints you are already using will dull your background colors (see 3.) and will also retain color harmony with the rest of the painting.
Cheers!
10/7/2023 2:13:09 PM
Recently I wrote about Andy Evansen’s method of painting: paint in three distinct value layers–light, medium, and dark–and let the paint blend freely in both the light and medium washes. In order to pull these first two washes off, you have to be able to mix colors very quickly, so that you can paint an entire wash before the paint dries and forms hard edges. In an effort to gain speed in color mixing, I have been experimenting with limited palettes. By confining my palette to only three or four pigments, I eliminate options that inevitably slow down my decision-making. With a limited palette, if I need to go darker, make the mix warmer, etc., I usually only have one route to that end. Isn’t that what they say about life as well? Unclutter your mind of unnecessary options that bog you down. This is just as freeing in painting as in anything.
Working with limited palettes, however, do much more than save time. I have been reading Hazel Soan’s latest book called Art of the Limited Palette, and she maintains that her most colorful paintings are those that use no more than three pigments. The reason for this is because mixing pigments tends to dull the chroma or brightness of the paint. While muted (or low chroma) colors play an important role in a painting, if too many pigments are in the mix, the result can be dead, muddy, opaque, like the color of the water you rinse your brushes in after painting for a while. Painting with fewer pigments ensures that as you mix colors and layer your washes, even the resulting grays and browns will be luminescent and lively. Furthermore, using a limited palette guarantees that the colors of the painting will be harmonious. No color can stick out like a sore thumb if it has been used throughout the piece. Finally, practicing with limited palettes helps you to attain a deeper knowledge of the character of a specific pigment, so that you have a clear grasp of what it can and cannot do.
So, in addition to Andy Evansen’s value studies, working with limited palettes is my new practice. These orchids from the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens were painted almost entirely with Ultramarine Blue, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, and Winsor Lemon. I was unable to get a dark enough mix for the soil from these three pigments, however, and had to swap out Winsor Lemon for New Gamboge to get a true black. This was not painted with the looseness and spontaneity that I so admire in Andy Evansen’s work, but I learned some things about color, which is a step in that direction.
9/22/2023 12:50:59 PM
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.
9/10/2023 9:52:24 PM
Hi! It's been a long time!
Last spring I started teaching in the medical humanities department at Creighton University, and getting back into philosophy again took quite a lot of time. Then, we decided in May that my husband would take a job at the University of Florida, and the whole moving process also took quite a lot of time. But we are here and pretty settled, so I am finally getting back to a regular art practice. I'll let you know in the coming weeks what I am doing for that. In the meantime, here's a sketch of an orchid that we saw at the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, which is only about 15 minutes from our new house. These gardens are gorgeous and, for me, a newcomer to the sub-tropics, are exotic and highly interesting. When you are far away from home and the people and places you love, what better tonic is there than to attend to something beautiful by sketching it?
Best wishes!
10/14/2022 10:37:35 PM
I'm excited to announce that Patricia Watwood has a new book coming out in December called The Path of Drawing: Lessons for Everyday Creativity and Mindfulness. I owe Patricia an enormous debt of gratitude because if it weren't for her, I wonder if I'd be drawing at all. A few years ago, I subscribed to Craftsy in order to take advantage of their cooking classes, but as part of the membership you have access to classes in all categories. I was trying to start nature observation journal with my daughter at the time, so I thought I'd try the class Start-Up Library: Learn to Draw. The class was taught by Patricia, and back then I had no idea that she is an important artist in the classical realist tradition (the Art Renewal Center has awarded her their highest designation: 'Living Master'). What I could immediately see, though, was that her teaching is impeccable. There are four projects in her start-up class, each masterfully chosen to introduce a range of techniques that build upon each other as you move through the course. This onion and leek still life is the third project that I did in her class. The classical realist methods that she teaches in the course really work, and I was amazed at how quickly she taught me to draw by explaining how to approach task of drawing a complex image by breaking it down into manageable steps. Furthermore, back then on Craftsy, you could interact with the instructors, and Patricia was always generous in replying to my detailed questions. I had mentioned in a comment that I had three young kids and didn't have much time for drawing, and she said something to me that I think about almost daily now: "The important thing is to keep moving forward." That advice has helps me avoid discouragement in those seasons when I find it almost impossible to practice art or when I make a string of bad paintings. It really doesn't matter so long as I show up again when I can, keep thinking on why something didn't work or what I can learn next, and try always to develop an artist's eye, even when I go a long stretch hardly picking up a pencil. All that to say, I look forward to Patricia's book and am confident it will be a wonderful resource. I also recommend the art classes on Craftsy, especially Patricia's classes (she has three others as well on that platform). I learned watercolor from another Start-Up Library class, and I think I've absorbed a lot about art in general from watching classes over the years while on the exercise machine--ha! Not the same as actually doing the classwork but helpful nonetheless. Have a great day, everyone!
9/19/2022 8:36:13 PM
I haven't had a lot of time for drawing and painting lately, and when I find myself unable to manage sustained practice, I try to find small things I can do to make progress in the nooks and crannies of my day. One of those things is to mix limited palettes of three colors to better understand what your colors will do. Here's a page of triads I've been slowly working on in my notebook that I keep exclusively for color experiments. (Aren't colors beautiful?!!!) The benefit of tying out triads on a single page like this is that you can see the moods and broad possibilities of three colors alongside the moods and possibilities of other triads, and this is a very helpful for selecting a palette for a particular painting. For example, I've been going through photos of our family's trip to the North Shore in MN this summer, and those cool, bright colors of 1) Hansa Yellow Medium, Ultramarine, and Alizarin Crimson, as well as 2) Winsor Lemon, Cobalt Blue, and Permanent Rose, would work really well with pure purples, blues, and greens of that region. And after seeing what high chroma colors you can achieve with a triad, you can test its the range of neutrals. The second, more subtle watercolor painting of hydrangeas I did in August (see Paintings) was painted with Winsor Lemon, Cobalt Blue, and Permanent Rose, and as you can see, you can get very muted, calm colors from that same palette that I intend to use for the bold, singing colors of the North Shore. I didn't have a plan when I started this triad page, but if I could start it over again, I'd consistently mix three greens on the right (yellow-green, green, blue-green), three purples next (red-purple, purple, and blue-purple), three oranges after that (yellow-orange, orange, and red-orange), and, finally, see what can happen by mixing all three in different quantities. That way I'd be able to see the greens, for example, by sweeping my eye down the page, instead of having to bounce them around the paper to make comparisons. What are some of your favorite triads?
8/25/2022 11:36:39 PM
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.
6/15/2022 10:36:47 PM
The irises have been in bloom for the last few weeks in Nebraska. Iris is one of my most favorite flowers--they are graceful, calm, and dignified in a way no other can match, I think. Here is a sketch of some irises from my neighbor's yard.
One thing I appreciate about quick watercolor sketches is that it gives you ample opportunity to assess your work. After an hour, you have a finished sketch to critique and learn from. Near the end of my time at REAL Academy, my teacher Ali Ghassan gave me a useful set of criteria for viewing my artwork and identifying key areas for improvement. They are:
1) Is the drawing accurate?
a. Are the proportions correct?
b. Is the form adequately simplified so that the essence of thing is communicated, or is it too bogged down with details? Is there a clear separation between the light and shadow side of the form? Did you work from the general to the specific?
2) Are the values (i.e., lights and darks) correct?
a. Are your values adequately arranged to show the form shadow, mid-tone, light, cast shadow, and highlight (if visible)? Does your work show that you understand the value range of different pigments?
b. Do the gradations of value accurately show the volume of the object? There should be a greater gradation for a high volume contrast and less gradation for a low volume contrast.
3) Does the work accurately show the structure of the form? Do your pencil lines or brushstrokes follow the light path, showing how the light hits the form?
4) How are the edges? Is there an interesting variety of soft, firm, and hard edges, and are they properly placed?
These are the most fundamental aspects to get right in a drawing or painting, and in this video he explains each of these points in more detail. (Of course, there are other important elements of a work to assess beyond these, such as composition, atmosphere, texture, and so on.) Now instead of looking at a sketch with a hodge-podge of possible critiques, I find myself using this as a checklist. And this is an awesome checklist because at the same time it is a clear map to the end goal of being able to convey the beauty of a small piece of the world.
The main thing that stands out to me in this sketch is it could use a greater variety of edges, especially softer edges on the leaves (as well as a bit less color and value contrast) so they do not distract from the focus of the sketch--the flowers. Here's to becoming better over time.
5/28/2022 10:36:27 PM
Hello. Since this is my very first post, I should say something about what I intend these posts to be. I envision that here I will be sharing mostly artistic experiments: daily sketches, practices that I have found helpful, or new insights I have discovered. When my family temporarily lived in Denver last year, I studied classical realism at Ali Ghassan's atelier. Now that we are back home in Omaha, I will be continuing with classical training remotely. I also love the movement of sketchers (e.g., Danny Gregory at the Sketchbook Skool and Urban Sketchers) who are committed to quickly drawing and painting the places in which they find themselves, ideally from life. I will be learning from both traditions moving forward and look forward to offering what I learn in this space. Constructive feedback is most welcome.
Today I begin with a simple watercolor sketch of my daughter's geranium in its black plastic container before she potted it. I've been reading Ted Seth Jacob's Light for the Artist lately, and it is helping me to understand the way that light reflects off of surfaces (more on this in future posts). Jacobs says that we can think of light as emanating in straight beams from the light source and bouncing off surfaces similar to the way a ball bounces off a wall. If the light (or ball) is thrown at a wide angle, it will bounce at that same angle in the opposite direction. If the light (or ball) is thrown directly in front of us, it will bounce off the surface (or wall) right back to us. This helps me to understand why we see a bright, white light area reflected from smooth surfaces and no strong white highlight on rough surfaces like terracotta. On a smooth surface, the particles of light bounce off that even surface at the same angles towards your eyes. On a rough surface, however, the light hits the uneven surface (uneven at the molecular level) and, hence, bounces off in multiple angles, somewhat obscuring the highlight. In any case, I'm fascinated by the way that dark local colors can look positively white at the point in which the light hits their surfaces. In this sketch, I was interested in the white rim of the geranium's black container.
