Watercolor Demo Class: Landscape "Down on the Farm"

Another of my Watercolor Demonstration Classes saw the painting of this landscape, and I have made a YouTube video of it that you can watch.  I chose the reference photo below because it contained so many typical landscape components and would be a good teaching tool.  I took this photo about 35 years ago, and it is probably from upstate New York.

Step 1. Working on a half sheet of Arches 140 lb cold press stretched onto a Homasote board, I first wet the entire sheet and started with a light wash of the late afternoon sky.  The sky is almost always the lightest section of a landscape, and it is important to keep the correct values of the sky versus the land relative to each other.  I used Hansa yellow in this background wash, letting it come all the way down to the bottom of the sheet so that it would also color the grass a bit.  Quinacridone red was washed over the top of the sky.
   While that was wet, I started to put in the distant row of trees, using thick perylene green, plus touches of brown madder and verditer blue.  Not too much water or the paint will spread too much!  You can see the gap I left for the barn.
   I also washed in the grasses with a mixture of Hansa yellow and cerulean blue.  I used a little black sumi-e ink in the mix because I think it is capable of producing some interested textural effects.  I splattered this darker wash with water to create backruns and spattered it with some blues.  I decided to leave the lower left unpainted to accentuate my intention of creating a loose painting.

Step 2.  Since I was filming the whole process with a web cam, I didn't stop to take enough step-by-step photos!  The next photo shows the painting about 80% finished.  First I started putting in the trees, using black ink mixed with burnt sienna and a rigger to apply the paint.  I experimented with various ways to get the suggestion of the leaves remaining on the trees.  A combination of spritzing with a spray bottle and then spreading paint around with a brush worked the best, along with a little spattering. 
    I detailed the brush along the foot of the trees with some darker paint, using my wolf hair sumi-e brush with the hairs splayed out to create the feeling of long grass and brush.  Also I used this brush in the foreground grasses.
    Next I painted in the barn and windmill (still need to add the windmill's blades).  I kept them simple and not fussed over.  Some long shadows in front of the barn give the feeling of late afternoon.  To finish this painting, I am thinking of adding some cows scattered about between the windmill and the barn.  That's about it for this one!  

"Down on the Farm" almost finished

By the way, I took a workshop recently with Baltimore artist Stewart White, who is a fantastic plein air painter in watercolor.  He has a little acronym  that I tried to apply in painting these landscapes:

D O N ' T:
     D = Don't Dilute too much
     O = Don't Overwork
     N = Don't Noodle
     T = Don't try to fix!

I think this is very useful advice if you want a painting that is fresh and spontaneous.  Yes, you can fix a few things along the way, but don't overdo it!  Have fun with your landscape painting--

Susan Murphy, ARThouse, 5/6/14

Watercolor Demo Class: Landscape "Batchellor's Forest"

For one of the groups that meets in my Watercolor Demonstration Class, I painted a landscape from right next to my house.  We have a country road that runs along our property called Batchellor's Forest Road, and it is the route taken by school buses to the local middle school.  I love to walk along this road and take in the Maryland countryside and some of the beautiful oak trees.  Here is the reference photo, from a misty fall morning:

Again, I made some decisions before starting:

• that the painting would be loose and not an exact representation of the photo
• that I would try to capture the misty feeling and light at the end of the road
• that I would eliminate the very straight tree trunk on the right (it looks like a telephone pole!)
• that I would add a school bus down the street coming toward us, with its stop sign out and some children waiting to board
• that I would film the painting process with my webcam 

Step 1.  Working on a half sheet of Arches 140 lb cold press stretched on a Homasote board, I started on dry paper by suggesting some of the light background colors that exist behind the big tree.  I splattered water on the wet paint to encourage backruns and textures to form, and I spattered with some cerulean blue.

Step 2.  After it was dry, I decided to re-wet and add more mist up in the trees in the form of ultramarine violet--I wanted the feeling of light at the end of the street to be stronger by virtue of the contrast.  I also did more spattering while this was wet.

Step 3.  Working from light to dark in this picture, I added an evergreen tree that will be behind the big oak tree.  I tried to make the leaves interesting.  Also I began to add some of the tree branches and trunks on the right.  The way to capture the feeling of mist is to make the objects progressively darker as they come closer to you.  Things in the foreground, such as the large oak tree will be the darkest.

Step 4.  I continued painting lighter trees in the background.  When they were dry I started to paint the large oak.  Each type of tree has its own unique skeleton, and oaks are always very contorted.  Many of the other trees here are beech trees, and they have elegant, straighter limbs that bow gently in the wind.  I hope I am capturing the feeling of mist here, but probably need to accentuate it more.  This painting is not finished yet and this is as far as I have gotten so far.  Sorry!

To finish:  I plan to add a small trunk and limbs to the red tree on the right.  Also I will add that school bus near the middle telephone pole.  I will purposely put it farther down the street and make it not too bright, to add to the feeling of morning mist.  When you add figures or objects to a landscape that are not already there, you need to be very careful to size them correctly for their position in the perspective of the scene.  I hope to add a picture of the finished painting to this article as soon as possible!

Susan Murphy, ARThouse, 5/6/14

Watercolor Demo Class: Landscape "Ambleside Walk"

Our second class in my three-part demonstration series was on painting the landscape in watercolor.  What a challenging subject!  I purposely kept the term "landscape" very broad, because it is broad, and encompasses so many possibilities!  For the purposes of teaching, I chose reference photos that represented landscape as we usually think of it: distant vistas, atmospheric perspective, sky, trees, perhaps some man-made structures, and perhaps some hills.  Below is the first reference photo I chose to paint:

This is a scene from Cumbria, England, near the quaint town of Ambleside.  Below is a close-up of the stone wall.  Sheep and mountain goats were present in other photos, as well as hikers.  Lots of great material to work from!  Always take more photos than you think you will need, because they might contain additional useful elements.

I made some decisions before starting:

• that the painting would be very loose and not a direct copy of the photo
• that I would use a lot of watercolor textures
• that I would use sumi-e ink to darken some of the colors as an experiment
• I would film the demonstration with a web cam attached to the ceiling above the painting (see resulting film on the Susan Murphy Channel onYouTube!)

Step 1.  I started with a wet-in-wet background wash and covered a lot of territory with this!  The paper was 140 lb Arches cold press stretched onto a Homasote board.  I did a minimum of drawing just to establish the line of hills and the stone wall.  Then I wet the entire sheet and started with the sky, using cerulean blue plus sumi-e ink and permanent violet for the cloud colors.  For the land I used perylene green, cobalt blue, quinacridone gold, and brown madder.  I spattered the wet surface with verditer blue and permanent magenta, plus salted it and then let it dry.  OK, I threw everything in the book at it!

Step 2.  Since I was filming the process, I did not take many step-by-step photos.  This next picture shows a lot of steps in one:

• The distant trees:  I re-wet the distant hills and used thick perylene green to suggest the distant trees and shrubs.
• The foreground grasses: I began to negatively paint around the stone wall with darker colors including brown madder and perylene green mixed with a little black sumi-e ink.  I used a large wolf-hair sumi-e brush to suggest the grasses because the hairs can be splayed out to make an irregular row of sharp points.  Also I softened the overly-strong texture from the salt a little.

Step 3.  This last picture is as far as I have gotten at this point:

• Re-wetted the distant ground again and inserted more dark trees.
• Defined the top edge of the stone wall by painting the rising hill behind it a reddish color.  Also painted some of the shadows of the stone wall.
• Used sumi-e ink mixed with a little permanet violet to paint the cloud shadows right over the distant land.  Perhaps the one of the right is too dark, but the one of the left works nicely.
• Last but not least, I used drafting tape and a stencil brush to lift out the sun beams!

"Ambleside Walk" almost there!

The painting is about 80% finished at this point.  I am planning to refine some of the shapes and edges, add a little English village in the valley to the left, and add some hikers crossing over the stone wall and walking down into the valley.  But for now I wanted to get this posting out for my students.

Susan Murphy, ARThouse, 5/6/14

Watercolor Demonstration Class: Still Life with Pears and Strawberries -- Part 3

OK, I am back again.  The painting is almost finished, for better or for worse!  I have made a lot of changes.  Here is where I had left off last time:

Step 10.  I have decided to completely change the background.  The "flannel" gray is just too distracting, and I think the pitch black of the reference photo is more effective.  I experimented with my painting on the computer using Photoshop to make the background black (see below).  Also I decided to get rid of the upturned dish towel in the back and make the whole table look round instead. To accomplish this in Photoshop, I selected the dark background using the magnetic lasso tool, and then I went to Image > Adjustments > Levels > I turned up the darkness of the selected layer.  It is interesting how making the background black really brought the objects to life!

background artificially blackened with Photoshop

Step 11.  Now in order to change the background and lower it about 2", I first had to soften the edge of the dish towel in the back and try to get rid of the stripes.  I was afraid the edge and the stripes might show through in my new wash.  I surrounded the objects with drafting tape (as you can see below between the pear and the pitcher) and I used Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to scrub out the paint.  This left a hard edge next to the objects and a soft edge going up into the wash.  You can see a little piece of the magic eraser at the bottom.  You just wet them and scrub.  I dried the picture thoroughly.

 

background scrubbed out and softened

Step 12.  Now I felt that I had to re-paint the lightened background with the same color I had used before, so that when the final very dark wash was put on, it would be uniform everywhere.  Oh, before doing this, I scrubbed out some leaves on the white bouquet, using drafting tape to form the shapes.

original wash mixture re-applied

Step 13.  Hopefully this won't be the unlucky step!  For my new wash I mixed up a very dark pool of perylene maroon and perylene green (two colors by Winsor & Newton that are very dark and clear) because they are complementary colors and form beautiful grays and blacks.  I turned the board upside-down and propped it up about 2" so the wash could run downhill, and proceded to do a big juicy wash using a #12-14 brush.  There was no masking fluid on this time, so I had to paint carefully around the flowers. I think the picture looks better already!

new black wash applied

Step 14.  Now I began to finish painting the white flowers and their vase.  The peony-like flower was very confusing and I had to study the photo carefully.  I got lost anyway, but it doesn't really matter.  I used a combination of bluish purples for the shadow shapes, blending to yellowish green as they went deep into the flower.

working mainly on the white flowers

Step 15.  I continued working on the white flowers and the interesting shapes inside their vase.  I added a slight curvature to the right side of the table.  The pink carnation hasn't been worked on again yet, but I don't think it needs much.  The painting needs some further refinements, but this is it for now.  I need to take a break!

"Pears and Strawberries" almost finished

 In conclusion, this really did turn out to be harder to paint than I thought it would be.  I am not crazy about the composition because of the amount of black background.  Perhaps the pink carnation could be cropped out.  Below is how it would look.  What do you think??

Susan Murphy, ARThouse, March 7, 2014