Methods / Focus: Direct painting, Washes and glazes, Rubbings and textural effects, Working the stroke
Direct painting
As its name suggests, this method does not require an intermediary between the paper and the pigment. You prepare colored washes in containers (saucers, milk bottle caps, or yogurt pots) and pour these washes directly one after the other onto the paper, wet or dry. Protect the table where you paint! Have fun!
In this watercolor, the backgrounds were created randomly. After a few tries, you will succeed in preserving the white of the paper. On cellulose paper, you will proceed with lifting or wiping to recover almost white areas.
Here, I used yellow, Schmincke orange, and Daniel Smith® shadow violet. Shadow violet contains ultramarine; it is this blue pigment that, upon contact with yellow, gives these greens.
Washes and glazes
Horse on the beach
After moistening the sheet in all directions, prepare a fairly dense cobalt blue wash and a diluted magenta wash.
Apply the cobalt blue in one go: with the large wash brush, from right to left then from left to right, until it is emptied of color. Reload it with a light blue wash, apply it leaving a horizontal area of white paper. Then deposit a diluted magenta wash in the bottom right corner in the form of a triangle sketch.
A wash is a colored liquid deposited on part or all of the sheet. It can be a single color (monochrome) or several colors.
Let it dry before drawing the horse (if necessary, trace it). Then, with the medium wash brush, color the animal in ultramarine blue starting from the center of the belly and finishing with the legs.
Using a glaze, darken the horse (see the gray recipes here) and use the same gray for the strip of land on the horizon. Do dry removals for the clouds.
Apply shadows with a diluted violet, a mixture of magenta and cobalt blue. A light and blended blue wash will underline the horizon line (use a ruler to measure it so that it is perfectly straight, perpendicular to the edge of the sheet).
Once the first layer of paint is dry, all other layers are glazes!
Rubbings and textural effects
Horse rider
For the top of the landscape: do not wet the sheet beforehand. Load a cobalt blue wash into the large wash brush. Deposit the blue in a single motion from right to left and lift it sharply when arriving in the last third on the left. The effects obtained are random, but in principle, you should notice that the paper has not been uniformly soaked with blue along its length.
Start again underneath with a diluted yellow wash and the medium brush, then with diluted magenta. Stop at the upper half of your sheet.
For the bottom of the landscape: on dry paper, make the skirt with the medium wash brush well wrung out (pressed 4 times), soak it with cobalt blue wash, and pass the belly of the brush against the sheet in a quick and light motion.
A halo has formed between the rubbings and the wash at the top. It's pretty, you can keep it!
The tip of the brush was not used for the rubbings. The color is deposited only where the belly of the brush touched the sheet. As a result, patches of intact white paper remain. These areas bring light to the reflections of the water on the beach at low tide.
Working the stroke
A tree
When we mention working the stroke, we cannot help but think of Cézanne's watercolors. Trace the tree and its branches with a light mechanical pencil. Moisten only the background, including the branches. Prepare a diluted cobalt turquoise cream with the medium wash brush for the background.
With the beveled brush, deposit ultramarine blue cream on the branches. Leave spaces of white paper.
If it is still wet, continue to nuance the shadows of the branches with perylene maroon; if it is no longer wet, dry it and rewet with a spray bottle.
Finish with an anise green wash (yellow and cobalt turquoise).
With the frayed spalter, wrung out and then dipped in a cobalt turquoise wash, draw the furrows in the air around the tree with a light hand.
Notice that even if the paper is quite wet, the color only bleeds where you deposit it.
For the trunk, start with ultramarine, then perylene maroon with a little burnt sienna, and finally a cobalt turquoise. Use the spalter for the furrows. Let the colors bleed into each other.
To finish, reinforce the dark values with the medium wash brush loaded with a perylene maroon wash with added Winsor blue (careful, it is powerful, use it sparingly!) for the branches and a cerulean for the bottom of the trunk and some small branches.
On the left, sketch a spot of burnt sienna while still wet (it will lose its intensity once dry).
The different shapes of the brush, the nervousness that you will give to your brushstroke, depending on whether you paint standing or sitting, the length of the gesture, all this will contribute to developing a rich and varied technique. In painting, too much regularity is often synonymous with monotony. You are not painting a wall!