Watercolour Play - Simple Leaves

Watercolour Play - Simple Leaves

It's good to reach beyond your comfort zone when you need to find new creative inspiration. 

Let's assume you've never picked up a paintbrush in your life. (It may be that you're the world's foremost watercolourist...this exercise is still a good one to begin with at the start of each painting session)

Let's begin with the very basics: tools, materials.

When you were 5 years old, a limp soft haired brush worked fine with poster paints. But now, as a grown-up, you ought to try grown-up tools. A round nylon watercolor brush has enough snap to serve you well, and the capacity to hold sufficient paint so you can make one sinuous stroke of colour to define an object. Number 4, 6, and 8 are generous sizes. 

Paint is pigment plus medium. With watercolour, raw pigment is mixed with Gum Arabic, which is the sap of the Acacia Arabica tree. Some pigments are natural earth, usually clays, like Raw Sienna and Terra Verte. Some are plant derived like gamboge, and rose madder. Others are chemically derived, like cadmium red and cobalt blue. Some manufacturers add fillers to student grade colours to make them more affordable. I prefer to use the best paint I can buy. I'd rather have six tubes or pans of the finest professional grade colours, than to have a dozen of cheap colours that won't give me adequate saturation and brightness. (Actually, I'd rather have a tube of every colour ever made.)

I am a colour junkie, if it's a colour, I own it. But range of colours is not so necessary. For this exercise, you need just three colours, red, blue, yellow. They are the primary colours, and from them many other colours can be mixed. 

So let's start with french ultramarine blue hue (genuine ultramarine's cheaper cousin)    cadmium red, and cadmium yellow. From these three many other colours can be made. 

A clever way to create your paint box is to recycle an old mints tin, and fill it with plastic watercolour pans. You can purchase your paint packaged in these pans or buy a tube of watercolour paint and fill an empty pan. 

Paper comes in hundreds of varieties. A good watercolour paper has some texture, and is not so absorbent that the colour bleeds if it is very wet. You want the paint to mostly sit on the surface of the paper and penetrate it only a little bit. The paper should be thick enough to not buckle or bleed through. If you like a particular paper but it is prone to buckling, tape it to a rigid board with painters masking tape, and run it quickly under the water tap. Let it dry. It will shrink against the tape, then it shouldn't buckle when you paint wetly upon it. 

Colour test sheet. 

Starting from pure yellow, lay down a wash on a scrap of paper, gradually adding a touch of blue to it until you have a satisfactory green. 

One stroke and multi stroke leaves. 

Using a round brush, wet only the very tip with the particular combination of yellow and blue that gave you the green you liked, and then in one stroke, from the top of the brush dragging down, increasing the pressure on the brush so the final result is a green leaf shape that goes from thin to thick. 

Draw a gentle S line going diagonally from one edge of your paper to the other. Starting at the top, and using your smallest brush, paint leaves in one stroke using this technique. Every third leaf, change to a bigger brush. 

Wreath of Oak

Oak leaves can be sharply pointed or round and lobular. Let's play with colour mixing on the paper with rounded oak leaves. Make a grid or line of squares of the colours which you intend to use, mixing them on the paper. 

Then, using a round brush, quickly sketch the colours into leaf shapes. Don't worry about outline. This is about color, and movement. Let the colours bleed into each other as you add colors wet into wet. Then, when the paint has dried, add a touch of another colour. Play with it. You're not painting something that will be framed. This is strictly for fun. 

Exercises like these are without obligation or expectations. There is no success or failure. There is something very satisfactory about this. And whether it is a warm up exercise for a session of more serious painting, or for writing, or making music, or cooking or coding, it will get your creative juices flowing. 

Autopilot

I pick up my brush, gaze ahead, and paint. 

I don't analyze my actions, although I do analyse what I am seeing. I break it down in my mind, shape, line, colour. If necessary I make a sketch, like making a map when giving directions. Usually I sketch, then paint directly on the sketch. The first sketch you make has all the energy in it. When you make a second sketch, you edit and lose the original impulse.

Once the bones of my painting are in place, in the sketch, I add flesh to them with colour and form. 

In this part of my work, there is no secondary thought, all is instinct. I work quickly, my paint brush writing a kind of watercolour shorthand. I have no time for clever tricks and techniques. In fact, I hardly even consider technique at all. 

I separate my conscious mind from the task at hand. I become all gaze and paint. I grab colour with my brush and apply it where it needs to go. 

When I am painting in a restaurant or coffee shop, as I frequently do, I completely ignore the stares of other people. I focus on a few key people for my drawing, they are the anchors of the sketch. I don't worry about pinning down exact details, that's for a completely different type of painting. I focus on what defines the scene: a colour, a quality of the light, how people interact with each other.

This comes from long practice. It is good to have a small sketchbook and tools with you at all times. Even if you don't use them, they are there, ready for you. And make a habit of sketching, even for a few minutes every day, it is essential for your growth as an artist.

You never arrive at a place in your life when you know everything. There is always something to be learned. 

If you feel like your work has reached a place where nothing new is happening, then try a new palette, a new medium, some new tools. The other day I purchased some new watercolours from Daniel Smith. They are truly new colours, recently developed, unknown to me. How will they live with my otherwise traditional palette? How will they handle?

It's time for some more colour grids, I think!

I've watched videos of myself at work. I am as fascinated as my students: I don't know how it works. I am surprised by my choices. I would never have consciously chosen my course of action. 

I am in the Zone when I paint, and anything I do comes from a place deep inside me, a place with no thoughts or analysis. 

Yet, somehow I know when I am finished. The same Mystery that informs my desires informs my painting. 

Warm Ups.

Warm Ups

Like an athlete preparing for an event, I practice my warm ups.

Color grid:

Making a color grid serves two purposes. It reminds me what colors I have, and it gives me a chance to be precise without having to over think what I am doing.

1. This is my palette: I usually go down my watercolor palette of dry pans, and with a flat brush I paint single squares on a scrap of paper.
2. Sometimes I'm in a blending mood: I chose colors and with the flat brush I apply them wet and mix them on the paper, again, in a grid of squares.
3. Watching paint dry: how does my paint sit on the paper? Again, making a square grid with a flat brush, I generously load my brush with color, and apply it very wet, allowing the paint to super saturate the paper. Next to each square, I make another one with the same color but very diluted.
4. Color play: I select color families and make a grid of them. All my reds, all my purples, all my blues, all my yellows, all my greens, all my earth tones. Sometimes I select complementary colors, sometimes all the warm colors and then all the cool colors.
5. Living in the shadows: I use a neutral tint to shade my colors, with the original pure color on the left and then several progressions of deeper mixtures of that color with the neutral tint.
6. There are the colors I'm going to use: I select the colors I intend to use in the painting for which I am preparing, and make a vertical line of them, and hand letter the names of the colors next to each one. 

Little leaves:

1. Wreath: Using a single stroke of a round brush, I make a wreath. Sometimes I lightly draw a circle in pencil using a stencil, or a compass, or a large coin. First I make a wreath of leaves of precisely the same size, all going in the same direction, and another one where half the wreath mirrors the other half. Then I make a wreath of graduated leaves, each one a smaller copy of the one below it.
2. Leaves in a spray: I loosen up my technique by painting leaves without a pencil guide, giving them bounce and movement.
3. Falling leaves: I paint a single branch above a cascade of leaves in autumn colors, allowing the colors to blend on the paper.
4. Autumn splendor: I paint single autumn leaves from photographs of actual leaves. Nature is more daring with color than I am.
5. Ferns: I paint delicate ferns, in a gentle S shape, with a curl at the end. I paint very wet, letting colors mix on the paper.

Practicing these exercises gets my hand and eye in shape for painting. It allows me to both unleash my looseness and discipline my control.

This very act of applying paint to paper is a pep talk prelude to my serious painting session. 

It's amazing to use a small hard bound watercolor sketchbook, and fill each page with one of these exercises. When it is full, it can either serve as an inspiration source, or as a cool gift for a friend. 

My New Art Supplies

Maybe it was something I discovered in my latest foray into my favorite art supply store.

Maybe I saw it in a post that intrigued me.

Maybe it was the installation that absolutely rivitted me at that last gallery.

Maybe it was that incredible magazine that I revisit again and again.

All I know is that I can't sit still until I actually have that new medium and tool in my own studio. It goes far beyond obsession and avarice. 

What joy it is to open a new tin of watercolor pencils, a new block of special paper, a new and utterly different tool! How excited I become with the possibilities!

Sometimes all it takes to emerge from the desert is to strike off in a new creative direction. 

For most of my life as an artist I was very driven by other people's opinion of my work. It was more than economics. At the back of my mind, even when I was working on something that had not been commissioned, I still contemplated how it could be marketed. 

This is a terrible trap. The art director says "The sky behind the hero needs to be darker." The curator at the gallery says "The blue paintings sold the best. Can you make more of them?"

Yes, I must make concessions in order to sell my work. But after a time, these compromises devour my soul.

Everyday, I set aside time for "me work", creative acts that are solely self-initiated with no thought for remuneration. 

It is in this work that my new art supplies are put to use. I can afford to take risks because there is no possibility of failure. All is exploration and experimentation.

And from this new territory comes the most amazing results!

Childish Pursuits

The things that intrigued and inspired us when we were children still have that power over us today.

As I child I was an avid beachcomber. Living so close to the beach it was easy for me to simply walk a few blocks away and explore the tide line for perfect tiny shells and sea glass. These were true treasures for me.

Here are some ocean treasures I collected when I was 7 years old. I kept them in a special box and as an adult I embedded them in the walls of my seaside themed bathroom. 

Here's a display of my jewelry, some of which I made from sea glass.

One afternoon, when I was a kid, I sat in the yard of the little girl who lived across the street. There were four of us children colouring with crayons in our colouring books. My book was Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. 

I was the kind of kid who coloured the entire page, from edge to edge, until the paper was stiff with wax.

I ran out of pages to colour, so I went home and got blank sheets of paper on which to draw. I continued the story. I invented a story about myself as a magic princess who could do anything she wanted. 

The other children stopped colouring in their books and asked if they could colour the drawings I was creating instead.

One little girl said, "I'll give you a nickel for that picture."

Another said, "I'll buy you an ice cream if you let me colour this one."

A little boy offered, "I'll let you borrow my lizard for a week if you draw a picture for me." 

It was at that moment, at age five and a half, that my professional career as an Artist began. I discovered that if I do what I love to do, I will have money, food, and maybe the loan of a lizard for a week. 

I have not regretted the choice.

The Eloquence of Possibility

There they are, in that jumbled pile. The half done projects, the special tools and materials for that particular project that was somehow never completed. The artwork that is almost finished, but not quite.

On my workspace are dozens of works in progress. Any one of them could be completed with a bit more time, but there they are, half formed and unfinished.

They haunt me. And I, I am all excuses and reasons. I'm not in the mood, the light is wrong, my back hurts, my eyes are tired.

If it was a paid commission I would wait until I was down to the wire, then at the last possible moment I would find myself in a frenzy of creativity, spurred by the fear of the deadline. 

But these are my own projects, not made for a patron or a customer, but self motivated pieces of art that have no destination. They may never be framed, printed or sold. They are the pieces which I do for myself.

Without the impetus of a deadline, my work sputters and comes to a standstill. A simple obstacle becomes a reason to stop. It stagnates and just sits there, mute testimony to my lack of engagement. 

Or is it?

What if inside that pile is the next great work of my life?

As I look back over decades of being an artist, I realize that every great work began with an unfinished painting, something that I set aside but couldn't discard.

To me, the unfinished painting is eloquent with possibility. 

And that thought alone is enough to make me reach for the paintbrush. 

Messy Energy

I am in the middle of a project. It's one of those many days, lots of steps, multi-procedural projects. My studio looks like an explosion in an at school.

Although I believe in going with flow, I also believe that a well rested mind functions best, so I reluctantly put my tools down to prepare for bed.

Brushes must be cleaned. My pallet must be tidied. Dirty water must be dumped, the bowls must be scrubbed. Soiled paper towels are placed in the rubbish, fresh ones are laid out.

I am preparing my work space for tomorrow's endeavors. When I enter the studio, I want all to be in readiness for my work. 

Yet, as I make my way to my bed, my mind is not so easily tidied away. Thoughts rush one on another. Images appear in my mind's eye.

I keep my notebook and colored pencils next to my bed. I make quick visual notes, in my own personal shorthand of imagery. 

“When you do something you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.” ~Shunryu Suzuki

This philosophy applies to both the creative act itself as well as to good studio practice.  Yet sometimes a bonfire burns for days, even weeks. 

When I work on a project that takes days, I find that I must establish a rhythm of working, and a routine. The routine makes it possible to return to the piece the next day with minimum fuss.

Decades of work have taught me to lay out my tools and materials just so, like a matter chef preparing a meal. The French concept for this in cookery is "mise en place"...everything put in its proper place. It's both a noun and a verb.

As artists, our mise en place is both the physical studio set-up and the mental preparation necessary to work. This allows the flow of creative energy to begin almost as soon as we enter the studio. The knowledge that all is in readiness allows us to contemplate the work even before we arrive at the studio. 

It's morning. I enter my studio. My tools and materials greet me, invite me in to continue my work. It's going to be another busy day.