I am one of those odd people who is periodically amused by watching paint dry.

Watercolor paints rather than house paints, that is. After oil painting proved too messy and smelly for my taste, I tried watercolors, instead, and fell in love with the medium for the beauty of the colors and the rapid drying times of the paints.   No quality art materials are cheap, especially if you buy them at art supply stores as opposed to a drug or stationery store, but compared with the cost of oil paints, brushes and stretched canvases, watercolor supplies seem like a bargain. Keep at any artistic discipline long enough and you’re going to generate a fair amount of clutter, but finished watercolor paintings also takes up less storage space than a canvas.   The fast drying time also makes watercolors easier to take with you on your travels.

   The chief rules of watercolor technique to remember are:

·         Work from your lightest shades to your darkest.  

·         Work from large areas to small.  You add the fine details last of all. This helps to keep you from overworking a painting. (Theoretically, anyway. I’m the queen of ‘just one more touch.’)

·         When building up  multiple layers of color with washes, it is essential to let the previous layer dry completely before you add the next one on top of it or you'll end up with muddy colors.

All of which means you have to do some mental planning of your painting before  you pick up a brush. I always make a pencil sketch of the composition, and I frequently paint from photographs, which I take for later reference, even when I’m doing a painting en plein air. (On location and outdoors.) It’s not always possible to return to a painting site after the first session, and you can’t count on having the same lighting on your composition.

The Photo Model

After loading that batch of photos into my computer, I went to work on composing my picture of the lilac bouquet.  In this case, it’s a very basic blocking out of the shapes, so that the finished work will have decent if not perfect proportions. I edited out the juice bottles out of the background photo in favor of a cleaner composition that focused on the lilacs.  After the pencil sketch, I lay a light background wash over the whole painting pad to act as a grounding color.  This time, it was a light bluish green, as that was the quality of the daylight in the kitchen on that rainy April afternoon.

 Figure 2  

Figure 3

During the second wash, I added the lightest background tone of the stone tile counter that the vase was resting on. In the third, I added the pale green ground shade of the vase when the second wash was dry. The first stages of a painting are frankly, not all that interesting, and don’t require much finesse. It requires a bit of faith that the finished work will look better and more interesting. At this point, you'll spend a lot more time waiting for the big washes to dry than you will working on the actual painting. That’s why I usually have two or more paintings going at the same time; while one is drying, I’ll work on the other, and so on and so forth. With the lightest colors, you want the washes to slop over the outlines of the drawing a bit. That way, you'll  avoid  having an  amateurish unpainted white outline around any part of the composition.

     Figure 4 

Paintings start to become more interesting when you’ve got the major areas blocked in, in this case, the lilacs  themselves.  Each painting is different. Sometimes, I just know a painting will work from the first moment I pick up a brush; some fight me all the way, but then surprise me by turning out well at the last minute. Sometimes a promising painting will take a sudden wrong turn in the late stages and the finished item is nothing like what I thought I'd get when I started.  While I paint, I regularly alternate between ‘damn I’m good’ and ‘eek, I’ve ruined it!’

Detail Lilac Petals

Figure 5

Things are getting even more interesting with this painting now that some basic details are being added, and slightly darker shades have been introduced for contrast. Rather than make a photographically accurate portrait of every single blossom on these sprays of lilacs, I was looking for some repeating shapes and patterns in the mass. When you look closely at lilacs, they grow in tight clusters of small blossoms all down their stems which gives a lilac spray a fluffy look. The individual flowers look rather like a square four-leaf clover, or the cross on the red cross flag, and the petals go out about half their length and then curl under themselves. This way, you capture the look without driving yourself crazy with exact details.

 

Figure 6

 

Figure 7 Close Up

 

Each blossom is darker at the center point of the flower, and the petals have a darker stripe down their centers. At this stage, I added some more medium purple values for contrast and to give the masses some shape and detail, and blocked in the leaves. Lastly, I added another, slightly darker green wash over the vase.  In figure 7, you can see the detail in the flowers more closely.

 

Figure 8

 

 

Figure 9

 

        In figure eight, I added more detail to the lilac blossoms, and then used a sponge to add some contrasting texture and interest to the counter top in figure 9. Then I went to work on making the leaves more leafy. (Adding the dark shades and details are the part when a  painting becomes most interesting to work on!)

 

Figure 10

 

 

Here you can get a better idea of the details.

Figure 11 Vase  

 

In figure 11, I gave the vase a bit more detail, including painting the horizontal green and blue stripes in the glass, and a third, slightly darker green wash around the bottom of the curve, and gave the counter a second, slightly darker beige wash to make the shadow around the base of the vase.

 

Figure 12

 

 

To make the shadow of the vase on the counter, I added the slightly purplish shadow at the center bottom edge of the painting, and used the same basic color in the wash over the top third of the background around the leaves to darken it a little and make the leaves stand out.

Signed and Dated! 

  

It’s pretty rare for me to be completely satisfied  with any painting, and I wasn’t with this one. But I’m more pleased with the finished result than usual.  The last touch on any painting I do is to sign and date it in the bottom right hand corner.  And Voila, there’s the painting!