How to simplify a subject in watercolor is a very important skill. Not only translating your subject into a simplified visual image but to paint it in a way that is independent of the myriad of details found in a scene. In this video you’ll learn how I treat my whole painting at once using flat layers and big brush, thus eliminating my ability to produce small shapes and details too early.
In each painting there is certain ratio of abstract vs. realistic (exclude either extreme from this example, hyper realism and completely non-representional works). What I mean is that we use suggestion to evoke a thing rather than rendering it faithfully. Some paintings are severely more abstract than others but the principle is the same. One of the basic devices for abstracting a subject is simplification. Once we break up an object into a set of flat shapes – its basic structure – we automatically make the work more abstract since we are not used to seeing it that way in real life. In today’s painting I do just that (going perhaps a bit further still) – I treat the planes of the painting as flat shapes that are positioned in space as successive layers, similar to a theatre set staging. I then use value to differentiate the planes and introduce the illusion of depth.
There are many ways to approach abstraction in a painting and many principles concerning abstracting your subject. This is just one of them.
