Capturing light in watercolour

by Tissa Hewavitarane

The key to an exciting painting lies in capturing the dramatic effects of strong sunlight in watercolour. The painting reproduced here shows the sunlight piercing through the trees to the roadway. To suggest the shifting, moving light, I have used a lot of broken edges trying not to latch on to individual objects. They'll be an important expressive element in the painting.

When there is an edge, it will be fairly crisp. You feel a sense of wonder when looking at something suddenly caught in a shaft of sunlight. The qualities of tone and colour in the areas hit by the light, compared to the areas in the shade, are fascinating.

When light falls on any object the colour is bleached out, yet when it falls through something, the colours glow rich and strong.

This excites anyone and I have spent a long time looking at the qualities of lights and darks in these situations.

Thrilling

The more you look at something and try to understand it, the more thrilling it becomes. Each drawing or painting adds to my level of understanding and makes me want to look more deeply.

I always work from nature. It allows me to understand exactly what it is.

I draw only what is important and use that when I need to paint without getting sidetracked by other irrelevant details.

The problem with effects that I am trying to record is that they are transient. You never realise how quickly the sun moves until you sit down to draw its effect on something.

Then it seems that every time you look up it has moved a couple of inches.

My aim is just to get down the most important bits first, and very quickly.

First decide what is most important to me about what I am looking at.

It might be the particular shape of a shadow across the area of light. Here the, distinction between accuracy and details is important.

Accuracy

You don't have to put everything in, but what you do put in, even if it is just a dot, needs to be accurately placed and drawn.

Having got the most important elements down, the bits that will hold the whole composition together, then more on to other areas.

Once you have got as much information down usually put the drawing to develop in mind to make it feel the painting ought to be composed in terms of shapes, rhythms tonal patterns and negative shapes.

There is always a lot to consider, but the more you can account or all these elements, the more visually satisfying your painting will be.

A sound painting is made up of beautiful arrangements of values and colour, and what helps in arranging the shapes is a knowledge of proportions.

It seems to me that there are those who without any training can come up with the most unusual arrangements of shapes and values.

Composition

They are so clever in the way they set things down.

How the parts of the painting are arranged on the paper is called design or composition. And how the painting is put together is really a matter of personal taste the personal desire of the artist. But there are certain elements which if put together correctly, will produce a beautiful pleasing design.The painting shown here is based on light caught in one instant before it moved on. The real challenge of light is that it is always moving and what I try to show the light moving around and changing as the sun becomes lower in the sky. As you progress, things happen, that dictate your next move, to the whole painting process is an organic series of decisions. This keeps the painting alive.

The eye goes to trees along the road and main parts of the painting travels around from object to object. The eye is always drawn to striking colours and their inclusion can turn an ordinary subject to a brilliant painting.

The technical richness of this medium is such that one of the most interesting techniques that it has is precisely the opening of space. On the other hand there is a sharp value contrasts. The shadows are shown in light colour to begin with. In addition, we are looking into the light of the sunlit road. As a result, the midtones and darks are all below the middle with just a few warm lights high.

Mood

One of the major ways light creates mood in a painting is through the key. How, for example, with the lights and darks be distributed in a picture? Which will predominate? And how will the key relate to the character of the subjects? You may find the key easier to understand if you compare the basic black-and-white value scale.

The values in a picture actually affect our eyes very much like musical notes affect our ears. If there is a predominance of darks in a picture, the picture is considered to be low in key. And the darks usually create a brooding, sober, dramatic feeling just as would a piece of music similarly full of deep notes. If there are a lot of brilliant whites and light greys in a picture, the picture is said to be high in key. The elements of design includes line, colour, shape, value, texture space and form. The ways to put them together are called the principles of design. The unity, variety propotion and movement must work together, relate to each other and be satisfying for a design to be good.