Procedures adopted in painting

by Tissa Hewavitarane

For any beginner to start doing a painting there are certain procedures to adopt such as selecting the weather to be a sunny day or a rainy day or misty day. With a suitable location you decide what you intend to paint. It could be a still life a waterfall as a outdoor scene, sea beach, upcountry scene or even a portrait.

Finally where exactly is the scene? Is it high or low? In front of you or behind you? Each shift in position changes the character of the subject. That's why watercolourists learn to work quickly outdoors.

The light determines the quality of the edges, the vibrancy of the colour and the contrast between values. You have to determine your theme, the kind of mass and line that correspond to the theme and even the drawing that best fits the particular subject. There is danger in watercolour painting when you only half know and then try to correct while you paint. Know first, and the medium will work for you.

Preliminary studies

It's very important to study the subject before start painting. If you know it well, you can paint it more freely. Form is also important when drawing leaves. Notice that the leaves on the upper right are thin and spiky, while those in the lower right are wider and more rounded.

Each must be drawn in a way that expresses its unique character. In this lesson I hope to get the reader to think like a painter, one who happens to express himself in the medium of watercolour.

The same basic thinking lies behind both oil and watercolour. Only the techniques differ. The oil painter has to instantly build his painting and should correct it. The watercolour painter, on the other hand, has to know before he begins and before the brush strokes touch the paper. The watercolour painter cannot guess and while he may make minor corrections, that is all. The watercolour painter works by elimination by paring a subject down to essentials. Watercolour, therefore, is the ideal medium for capturing the effects of light and is a medium that is fresh, alive and responsive to the moment and the shifting of moods of nature.

As you have just learned, nature is always changing and we, as painters must observe and paint each colour and value carefully and colours of the sky. A successful painting of nature's vista depends on our knowledge of the role the sky plays in the spectacular drama.

We must always be aware of the affect that the light has on our painting. An oil painter places his warm colours or light colour on the canvas and then mixes very carefully the cool light of the atmosphere. The colour must match the value of the light colour and should be painted in such a way as not to mix these two colours laying one over the other.

Transparent medium

For the watercolour painter it is different because we must keep the light colour a lighter value so as not to make the second wash look green. We are working with a transparent medium. I wish to express a time of day and atmosphere of that day. One way is the use of "light" itself, the colour of the light all over the sky.

I change the yellow where the sun is in the sky, using a pure light yellow and as we move away from the sun, I add a little red or orange - ever so lightly to this colour.

If the atmosphere is heavy, I then add a reddish tone, again very light at the horizon. When painting clouds, the procedure I use is to warm the paper first slightly - a very lighter colour than the light as there are white clouds so far away. Special situations call for certain pigments. When painting the sky, for example, you need pure, clean and intense colour. Different kinds of light also call for new colours.

Demonstration

You should bear in mind that in each demonstration the light changes, but the painting procedure remains the same. That's the rule of the game. Observe the painting I have done of a landscape in the Central Province with a lake. It is title "Evening shadows".

As you can see the background contains a variety of dark shades and a light wash towards the horizon. The sky is painted with a mixture of violet and orange conveying the tranquil mood that prevails at the close of day. The trees are painted wet-in-wet to give a pleasing mistiness at the close distance with a mixture of olive green while the two trees almost at the centre show only twigs and branches of the trees merely suggests using dry brush strokes.

Notice the lake side scene with three tiny figures of animals giving a dramatic impression of the sheer scale and grandeur of the natural world. You should experiment to find all the techniques available. Do practise these techniques although they probably won't come off best at first.