Learn Watercolour Landscapes Quickly E-Book

Hazel Soan

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 61

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

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.

Coming Back by Boat, Venice38 x 28cm (15 x 11in)Water fills both the foreground and the middleground – about two-thirds of the picture plane. A boat in the distance is coming towards the middleground but is still high up the picture plane, and the distant ferry and buildings are in the background, in the top third of the picture plane.

The horizon

The horizon is always at our eye level no matter what the vantage point and whether it is visible or not. At sea level we can see almost 4.8km (3 miles) before the Earth’s curve obscures our view. From a height we can see further; if we stand on a hill at an elevation of 30m (100ft) our view extends to just over 19km (12 miles).

Ed and Aimée in the Marienfluss30.5 x 66cm (12 x 26in)The horizon is always at our eye level, whether we are looking across an expanse of landscape or at something close. Our visual acuity is so good that we can see hundreds of kilometres from a mountaintop if the air is completely clear.

Depth, distance and space

The landscape space we see before us starts at our feet, travels to the horizon and returns overhead in the arc of the sky. Atmospheric perspective takes place within this concave space, making things smaller, bluer and less defined in the distance. The terms background, middleground and foreground refer to the depth of the space, which can be deep or shallow depending on the portion of the view we choose to paint. The physical features within the space, such as hills, trees, bushes, buildings, figures and animals, are mainly bulky, rounded or cuboid forms, with their relative size found by linear perspective. Painters have several tools to create the illusion of depth on the flat picture plane of the paper: these are scale and perspective, strength of tone, colour temperature, definition and counterchange.

Mara Landscape38 x 28cm (15 x 11in)The comparison between the size of the trees at the bottom of the painting and the diminished size of those higher up the picture plane implies the vastness of an African plain.

Lone Tree, Mara38 x 28cm (15 x 11in)The strong tones of the foreground tree bring it forwards in contrast to the paler background, creating a sense of distance between the two elements.

IN THE DISTANCE

Tones are paler

Colours are cooler (more blue)

Scale makes similar-sized trees appear smaller

Less distinction and detail are visible

IN THE FOREGROUND

Tones are stronger