Etudes in watercolor: how to develop creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Watercolor technique is quite diverse, but at the same time complex. Paints need to be diluted with water, due to this they become more mobile. In turn, this allows you to use various techniques: working out fine details, making wide fills, pouring one stroke into another.

When learning to draw, it is useful to do sketches in watercolor. It is very important to see the work as a whole and feel the picturesque environment.

Tips

1. Don't be afraid to draw. Everyone can depict vegetables, fruits or landscapes, the main thing is to believe in yourself and find inspiration in yourself.
2. The quality of watercolor paper plays an important role, the final result depends on it. It is necessary to try out all the varieties of sheets encountered in order to choose the ideal paper for yourself. It is necessary to make notes on the sheets (the weight of the paper, its grade and what the result is).
3. When visiting a park or other picturesque place, you need to take a camera with you. After all, photos in the future can inspirecreation of new works. Starting to create new studies in watercolor, it is the pictures that will remind you how they should look.
4. To remove excess moisture from the brushes, you will need napkins or paper towels.

Etudes in watercolor: fruits and vegetables

Teaching watercolor painting is carried out in stages. They start with easier tasks, and only then move on to more complex ones. For starters, any fruit or vegetable can be used as nature. The main task in this case is the transfer of tones and drawing the volume of objects using the background and falling shadows.

At the first stage, you need to draw the outlines with a simple pencil. It is better not to use an eraser, but simply to draw a thin, slightly noticeable refinement line. In order not to forget about the shadows, you can slightly shade the necessary areas.

Next, leaving highlights in the right places, the entire surface of the picture is filled with the lightest shade. When the raw substrate is ready, start writing the selected vegetable or fruit. The first should be a semitone, then, starting from it, shadows and light are written. In conclusion, it remains to clarify the tonal solutions.

Having mastered the studies of vegetables, watercolor will no longer be a problem, and then you can move on to the image of several vegetables or fruits, then a jug and a still life.

How to paint a landscape in watercolor

The atmosphere of watercolor sketches is just one moment, a fleeting state of nature that the watercolor artist managed to capture.

Starting to draw sketches in watercolor, the landscape must first be imagined in your head. The artist must determine how much space on the sheet will be occupied by the sky, and how much - by the earth. Often the horizon line is lowered a little below the middle, and this is compositionally correct. A watercolor sketch begins to be depicted from the sky, especially if the artist has chosen a wet technique.

At the second stage, landscape planes are drawn. Enhances dark areas. At this stage, it is necessary to concentrate not only on the planes, but also on individual details. The final stage is work with thin brushes, they draw small details and make the picture complete.

Etudes of flowers in watercolor

When an aspiring artist starts to draw a bouquet of flowers, the first thing he sees is a lot of small twigs and flowers. However, do not be confused. Getting to work, the first thing you need to harmoniously arrange the flowers in the right order. The background is created by small flowers, they are depicted further and they should be smaller.

You need to retreat 3-4 cm from the edges of the sheet - this will be a frame that you cannot step beyond. The preliminary picture must be sketched with a pencil, and you should not put pressure on it so as not to deform the paper. The composition should resemble a geometric figure (triangle or oval).

When working with paints, on the palette you need to prepare a selection of the desired cold and warm shades that will be present in the picture. Start work from the background, initially working with lightpaints, and after that darkening the areas with a shadow.

Then they move on to drawing flowers. Initially, light shades are outlined, and after that shadows are added to the petals with a glazing thin layer. Care must be taken to ensure that many small details do not appear in the background.

Etudes in watercolor should be written in general, it is better to do it “raw”, so that one color smoothly passes into another. This is how unique shades are created, and the drawing turns out to be alive. You just need to finish the small petals and stems with a thin brush.

Interesting

Watercolor is very similar to gouache, so they can be used together. The difference between these colors is transparency. Watercolor is more transparent than gouache. It is this property that determines the final result. However, these two techniques are based on similar techniques.

When creating sketches with watercolors, you need to control the amount of water in which you need to dilute the paint. The liquid not only dissolves the paint and makes it more transparent, but also determines the degree of clarity of the future drawing. Therefore, it is best to learn watercolor technique by determining the required amount of water.