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Ed Hutchins workshops in Australia!
Replied Sep. 9, 2008
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take care
Ross
I work life-size, BTW. It's easier to measure proportions directly. One of the mistakes I made starting out, which discouraged me, was thinking I had to cover a huge piece of white paper all at once. I should have made smaller studies of single things and then moved up from there as my skill increased.
Several years ago, I had the time to do the botanical art certificate here at Morton Arboretum. The certificate consisted of about eleven classes: drawing, Watercolor 1&2, botany, tree identification, one or two other elective natural history classes, scientific illustration, and choices between the various electives they offered. Although I had worked for many years as a commercial artist, I found the watercolor class most helpful: the instructor made us do several studies, starting out with blind contour drawing (drawing something without looking at hand or paper), an eight-tone value scale from white to black, the color wheel you described, the overlapping stripes exercise described earlier, and what was most helpful, a single study of a walnut meat, first in two values, then three values, then five values. It's harder than it sounds, but it taught me to really see value and not be afraid of going as dark as the subject presents itself to be.
Good luck and do post some of your work online! : )
Watercolor: you're right in saying the basis of much good watercolor painting is good drawing. : )
"Watercolor is hard" is a myth. I have disproved that myth. : ) Watercolor DOES need patience, just as oil painting does. It requires learning to see values and color both accurately and creatively, learning to build value carefully, and keeping color mixes very simple (best not to mix more than two simple pigments at a time). (look for colors that only have one pigment in a tube - the teeny little numbers like OR23 or Y165 etc you will see on the sides of the reputable brands)
You can (unless you're in the habit of always using staining pigments) wipe back quite a bit, almost to white. And you can use an eraser or knife when needed to scrape back color. If you have raised the grain of the paper that way you can rub it back down with the back of a spoon. For worse cases,you can make thin gelatin sizing and restore the finish to a damaged area and then repaint small passages. Or even rework your composition to hide the flaws, which you only will know about and obsess upon. : )
You do have to know your pigments and your papers, which takes a bit of practice. I make a practice grid of stripes of each pigment, and then make another set of the same stripes crisscrossing the first, to see how the colors look when they overlap. That's an essential exercise to learn from. But it's fun, you can be tight or loose, expressive or realistic to the Nth degree. There are no solvents to deal with, it dries quickly, it's less expensive per square inch than oils or acrylic and often is much more durable. : ) No, don't be intimidated by the watercolor myths. Go have fun and disprove them! : )
My first assignment to all my art students is drawing in full value, then painting, an egg. If you can paint an egg, you can paint anything. : )
hopefully Ed's website can be added ft it is not already to the main page listing of artist books links. do you know how to do this?
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