Painting 101:

The style is your personality

by Tissa Hewavitarana

There comes a time, after you’ve struggled to control the paints, brushes and water for a year or two that you really begin to work with a reasonable amount of fluency and confidence. In other words, you’re becoming efficient in your craft.

This is where the next stage of the struggle begins - to be able to stamp your own personality on your work so that people will recognise your painting even without your signature.

Once I took my paintings to a private gallery for an exhibition. The owner gradually went through them and put about eight paintings aside. I thought that they were the best of the collection. “They were”, he said, all reasonably competent, saleable paintings but those eight had a reasonable quality.

They all looked unmistakably as though they had been done by the same person.

Inspiration

He also said that when a viewer glances at a painting, he should be able to recognise the work at once. His words had quite an effect on me, and since then I compared my work with other painters.

At the annual exhibition, the uniqueness of approach has always appeared to be the secret factor - quite apart from their skill with the brush. Every painter has their own style and you may get much inspiration by seeing a particular artists work. However, as you progress you may change your style.

But I could see that during the early years he had been influenced tremendously by famous painters of his time, until inevitably, his own strong personality completely took over. A style is an inevitable growth of both the artist’s skill and his own philosophy. The style should not be restricted to a very narrow selection of subjects.

Flexible

Your style should be flexible enough to encompass all types of subjects and different ideas. A style will take a long time to develop. It needs concentration and a careful observation of your technique. Study the painting reproduced here, titled “Fisherman mending his net”.

Observe the mixture of burnt sienna with warm blues which gradually blend with the strong hues. To make the picture lively a boat in a very light tone is painted. It was my intention to first express the quality of strong light using transparent pigments thus increasing the impression of light and luminosity.

The light wash indicates the fisherman’s net. The scene is a typical wet-into-wet painting with sharp touches added for contrast and depicts my style.

Water washes

Washes should be prepared in containers that will hold plenty of water and hot only in thimbles. Painted washes are continuous areas of water colour that take more than a single brush stroke to apply and succeeding strokes of either colour or water should be made at the wet edges to spread the colour.

All this must be done rapidly to keep the tones of the wash even. Some drawing paper help this process while others hinder it. Colour and value changes can be made while applying washes. Applying a loaded brush to paper is a delightful experience. The paper is very important when working with water colours because they blend together.

The colours required by the artist depend on what they want to paint. The quality and the depth of colour gained are shown very lightly. Despite the fact that the wash is executed with water colour it is a drawing technique.

No matter whether you are experienced or not, you will see how closely wash is linked to drawing.

A wash allows the artist to paint different tones of the same colour, according to the amount of water that is added to the paint on the palette. The drawing is the foundation of the water colour painting. It is used as a guide to where to apply the various tones of colours. Therefore, it is essential that the artist draws the subject correctly in lines before starting to paint. It is a legitimate technique to draw your picture first with a light lead pencil correctly.

It is the first step any beginner needs to know to get started with water colours.

Points to remember

*Paint the effects of strong light.

*Capture the light at a special time of day.

*Use the light to express emotion.

*Paint the light, not the place.

Select the most appropriate time, place, and subject in painting the out doors.

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