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- Herausgeber: Batsford
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A guide to landscape painting for complete beginners with simple exercises. Hazel Soan is a hugely successful painter and an outstanding teacher and author of art books, which have introduced the wonders of art to a generation of amateur artists. In this book she teaches you how to get to grips with watercolour landscapes in the space of an afternoon. The book explores the basics of watercolour landscapes with lots of simple exercises and step-by-step demonstrations that are perfect for beginners. That life-long ambition of painting somewhere that is important to you can become a possibility with the help of this nifty little book. Topics covered include creating space, composition and focus, light and shadows, colours of the landscape and the mixing of watercolours. Watercolour painting techniques such as painting en plein air, brushwork, creating texture, wet into wet and wet on dry are explained. The book also explores specific landscape themes such as skies, foliage, forests, gardens, seascapes, wilderness, sunsets, urban landscapes, panoramas, sunsets and many more.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Learn Watercolour Landscapes
Quickly
Hazel Soan
To the Initiator of the Big Bang, for Planet Earth
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Tina Persaud for asking me to write this book and my editor, Lilly Phelan, and the designer, Sarah Pyke, for bringing it so expertly into being. It has been a pleasure. Thank you to everyone at Pavilion for making book-writing so enjoyable. Thanks must go to my husband for his driving skills, which have enabled me to paint in remote landscapes in Africa and North America, a privilege I have always appreciated. I also wish to thank Cathy Gosling for being a constant inspiration and companion of the mind.
Contents
Introduction
CHAPTER 1Creating Space
The art of illusion
The picture plane
The horizon
Depth, distance and space
Scale and perspective
Strength of tone
Colour temperature
Definition
Counterchange
Summing up the basic rules
Start-up materials
CHAPTER 2Focus on Composition
Finding your focus
The horizon line
The rule of thirds
Selection and orientation
Light and shade
Balancing colour
Leading lines
The grand view
Paint from life
CHAPTER 3Light and Colour
Its all about light
Sunlight and shadow
Paints and palette
Mixing colours — the limited palette
Choosing colours
Blue
Green and yellow
Red and brown
CHAPTER 4Landscape Techniques
The painting process
Painting techniques
The graded wash
Tinting the horizon
Variegated washes
Brushmarks
Using aids to conserve light
Retrieving light
CHAPTER 5Landscape Themes
The inspiration for the painting
Skies and clouds
Inclement weather
Rivers and streams
Trees
Fields and grasses
Sea and shoreline
Gardens and flowers
Architecture
Figures in the landscape
Mountains
Wilderness and desert
Sunsets
CHAPTER 6Epilogue
Keep going
Index
Introduction
Watercolour landscape painting is an exciting process. It takes a piece of the huge wide world, shrinks it to paper size, flattens it into two dimensions and creates something that did not exist before. Though it may resemble the landscape the artist sees, it is not the landscape, nor is it a copy – it is a new creation, a watercolour painting. I find this creative metamorphosis rather magical. How is it possible? Read on and find out.
Little is needed to suggest a landscape.
West Virginia Byway28 x 38cm (11 x 15in)The characteristics of the watercolour medium are so attractive in themselves that a mundane subject, such as these two roadside sheds, makes an enjoyable painting with just three colours – Alizarin Crimson, Aureolin and Ultramarine Blue – and a play of light and shade.
The art of illusion
The magic that makes landscape painting possible is the art of illusion. With the use of tone, colour and perspective, the artist has the means to convince the viewer that a three-dimensional world is reinvented on the flat surface of the paper. Watercolour is the perfect accomplice in this illusion; lightweight and easy to carry to any location, it is quickly applied and dries fast.
Three-dimensional illusion, however, is only the means to an end. Successful watercolours are not a matter of reproducing exactly what you see on paper – they are about making something new in the form of a painting. A watercolour may be inspired by the landscape but should inherit a life of its own. Before you start, instead of thinking that you are using watercolour to paint a landscape, rather think ‘I am using the landscape to paint a watercolour.’ This simple adjustment of mindset will free you from imitation and allow you to be creative.
Delete copy
Happily, you can remove the word ‘copy’ from your painting vocabulary. A painter cannot possibly ‘copy’ a landscape – no piece of paper would be large enough and the landscape is overwhelmingly three-dimensional!
Summertime in Wargrave25.5 x 33cm (10 x 13in)Watercolour is a very practical medium for painting outside and can be applied quickly or slowly, at any size, to accord with how much time you have available. Here my time was limited, so I chose a small fragment of the garden scene.
The picture plane
The flat space on which a painting is made is called the picture plane. In most landscape paintings, three main areas are represented: the background, the middleground and the foreground. The easiest way to think about the picture plane is to imagine it as an upright window pane. If you were to trace the contours of a landscape observed through the glass with a marker pen, the background would be higher up the glass than the middleground, and the foreground would be in the lowest portion. Because the painting is both flat and yet represents the three-dimensional reality, we might describe a feature as being ‘in the background’, ‘higher up the picture plane’ or ‘further back in the painting’ – that is, sometimes it is the painting that is being described and at other times it is the content relating to the reality of the landscape.
