Tips

Are you having trouble with drawing and composition? If so, look at the gaps between things, rather than the items themselves. The painter’s world is flat - on paper and canvas, spaces of air are no different to solid material things.
Even within an item, it is spacing that counts.

If you are interested in painting faces, for example, take a look at my current series on portraiture in The Artist magazine: this month I concentrate on the features within the face, and here again it is the positioning of the eyes, nose and mouth in relation to each other that counts, just as much as getting each feature shaped right.

Do you have times when the paint on your watercolour palette looks more lively than the watercolour marks on your painting? If so, be a little less controlling and introduce blobs of paint onto the paper by more random means. Give the paint some freedom and it can make unexpected and exciting marks.:

For example, load the brush and flick back the brushhead to splatter small blobs onto the paper to suggest foliage, grasses or mud. Flick an old toothbrush loaded with paint to make a soft spray of small blobs to suggest gravel texture or spray; flick a loaded brush in a horizontal motion along the bottom of a beach scene to suggest footprints in the sand, or drop watercolour onto the paper from directly above to make colourful splots.

Time, our most valuable, irreplaceable asset, is highlighted as we enter another new year. Painting takes time because creation takes time.

From human scientific discovery, we can assume that our Creator (I believe in God) took an abundance of time to evolve the millions of different species of plants and animals, used even more time to shape small blue, red and other coloured planets, and still more time to swirl and gather countless particles in an infinite arena, set in motion immeasurable universes, minute and massive chemical reactions, etc, etc.  

In our small way as watercolour painters we get the chance to be mini-creators, to make something out of ‘nothing’, turning a blank sheet into a new creation using a zillion colourful particles swirled around with water, harnessing the properties of light. We set them in motion to make some sort of order on the paper allowing for random exchanges, which can go either way. We know to some extent, (by the laws of physics and chemistry, and our own experience), what should happen, but we are never quite sure of the outcome. Isn't this why the adrenalin pumps? Because chance is integral to watercolour painting, (as it is to evolution and planet building). With time we get more adept at controlling the materials, putting right what goes wrong in a painting, at correcting mistakes - even using the mistakes - and realising what counts, but it takes time to gain that experience (some quote the 10,000 hour rule).

All of the time spent painting is worthwhile for progress, if you are enjoying the time, how can it be wasted? Plants do not stop sending out seeds because some never germinate, they just keep on sending them out and some bear fruit! So this year, let your motto be Nike's, "Just do it": keep on painting no matter what! 

Don’t be afraid of the Dark! Although watercolours are generally built up from light to dark this does not mean you cannot go straight in with your darks. If you want delicious translucent, luminous bright, deep or dark areas in a watercolour it pays to be bold with the initial applications. To err on caution and increase the depth of colour with tentative incremental layers is usually a recipe for dullness and may not benefit the watercolour. Maximum translucency is found in the first layers brushed over the white paper, so these washes are therefore the freshest and most vibrant.  And if a bold wash does come out too rich, or dry too dark, the pigment can be lifted off with the brush because it is effectively in a similar state to concentrated pigment in the palette - the gum Arabic can be dissolved with very little water on the brush to release and shift the pigment particles one by one or en masse! 

In October I tutored a painting holiday in the South Luangwa in Zambia. We had plenty of space in the game viewing vehicles and the painters followed my lead in painting the wildlife and landscapes from the vehicles, even painting while we were bumping along! The ‘less is more’ principle of watercolour became very apparent in this set-up: 3 small pots of water nestled within a low height container could survive rattling around on the bumpy roads, a palette of pans and 1,2 or 3 brushes max, was enough to handle, 3 colours in each painting were enough to manage and made the painting more straightforward. ‘Painting on the hoof’ is very good practice for becoming more ‘efficient’ in watercolour. If you are becoming studio-bound or slow to take your paints out in ‘the real world’, deliberately break the habit. Take a minimum of materials with you, into the lounge, the garden, the cafe; out in a park, to the mall or the promenade.  Keep the subject simple, just paint skies and clouds, or quick figures, bird shapes and colours, the tonal recession of distant hills, or the shapes of trees and the gaps and spaces underneath them, and amaze yourself with what you can do in less than 20 minutes in watercolour (especially if it’s getting cold!). The bliss you will experience will last much longer. Go on have a go!

If you want to learn to paint I encourage you to spend time painting from life, transforming the 3D world into 2D. That means making paintings from the physical world. Learning to see for making paintings is about observation, making judgements and selections, pulling stuff in, leaving stuff out. How and what you notice and enjoy in any subject matter is unique. What you choose to represent and emphasise is the stamp that becomes your style. Painting from photographic reference is fine once you know how to paint but it is a hard way to learn because, instead of shrinking the world to the size of your canvas or paper and making all the decisions and choices that come with that minimalisation, you have to enlarge from framed and limited information, so it is learning to paint the wrong way round!

Welcome the adrenalin rush, the stress, even the angst of painting from life - if painting was not a challenge, if it was easy, it would not be called an art.

When you see something you want to paint, ask yourself what in particular has attracted you to this subject even before you start drawing and observing in detail. It is usually something less concrete than the subject itself; eg it could be the way the light is falling on the subject, the shape the subject presents, a combination of colours, or an exciting tonal exchange. This is the real subject of the painting, not the physical item. This is your focus. Remind yourself of the reason as you get deeper into the painting in order to stay on target, tell yourself repeatedly why you are painting this view and even explain it to anyone who shows interest, whether they have wings or not!

I am currently painting in North America, my watercolour road-kit is down to as little as possible. The sketchpads I use outside have to fit into my artbag (slung over my left shoulder) which means size is limited, but this means my right side is free to flip open the cover, take out the pad, palette, pencil, brushes, fill the water pots and start painting within a very short time, because the light effects or incidents that attract me rarely last very long.

A camera also has to fit in the bag for the fleeting images that are impossible to catch with paint or pencil. A watercolourist needs very few materials - if you encumber yourself with too many they may even put you off starting to paint - so I challenge you this summer to reduce your watercolour kit to the minimum and discover just how little you need and how quickly you can set yourself up to paint watercolours outdoors.

Watercolour welcomes the bold.

By bold I mean a confident approach to brushstroke, colour and tone. Trust the medium to deliver the freshness inherent within it by using fewer brushstrokes, fewer colours, fewer layers and a more immediate delivery of tonal depth. Taking the brush back and forth upsets and wearies the pigment particles, too many pigments tend to darkness, excessive layers compromise translucency, dark tones built up through layers are less vibrant than deep transparent single layered darks.

So be confident, be deliberate, try to get the appearance and effect intended with bold applications rather than hesitant increments. A watercolour that takes one hour may be fresher than if you take two, but it is not speed that is the key, it is the enthusiasm, efficiency and economy of delivery and application that contribute to the freshness of watercolour.

The Temperature of colours seems to be quite a confusing area, so here is more clarification. Red is warm and blue is cool but within each hue (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown, grey) there are many different versions, and these individual colours have a red or blue bias, ie they veer towards red or blue. This ‘veering towards’ warmth or coolness is what constitutes the temperature of the colour. Hence Alizarin Crimson is classified as a cool red because it is a red that veers towards violet, and violet is going in the direction of blue. In relation to blues and greens Alizarin Crimson remains a warm colour but in relation to other reds it is a cool red.

A good way to see temperature bias is to paint swatches of all your yellows (then reds, then blues and so on) and compare their warmth or coolness alongside each other.