Learn to paint shapes and get better at watercolor. How? In this short tutorial I’ll show you how I paint a watercolor study with simple, large shapes with little detail. This painting shows that the underlying structure (correct tonal values and shapes) is more important than detail, color or trying to paint “things”.
Though similar to some of my previous lessons, I find that the importance of painting shapes, not things, is always worth repeating. Unless we retrain our brain we try to paint things. We keep painting what we see, and we think of what we see as real life objects. We paint, or rather we try to paint little trees with leaves and blades of grass, a roof, a window, a barn and we do so as we see them in our reference, either in photograph or real life. We forget about the big picture. We identify too much mentally with the objects.
Instead, we should try and think in terms of shapes. When we paint a fence, we are not literally painting a fence in our yard, we make marks on a piece of paper that function as a symbol of a fence, which by association suggests to the viewer an illusion of a fence. We must “reset” our perception of the world around us. We must return to the way we’d seen it before everything in it was named for us. Only then we can liberate ourselves and stop painting things.
In today’s painting I work from my sketch. I did make it from a photograph but I worked with the “things” found in the photograph in terms of design elements and principles, recreating the scene as a set of shapes that fit together well. This way I can capture the essence of the scene. This doesn’t mean that we have to alter each of our subjects every time. Most of the time though the reference is not providing us with the proper relationships of the parts to the whole. What we therefore must do every time is to try and introduce the missing order into our version of reality.
My goal always is to arrange the shapes that represents object in such a way as to create a strong underlying structure for my painting. I think more in terms of shapes and tonal values than color or what the shape represents. Color is the icing on the cake. A painting with beautiful colors but weak values doesn’t have any future.
Always look at the general value distribution, thy to see patterns, balance shapes against each other. Watch my other demos that deal with patterns if you’d like more clarification.
