Watercolour Lesson 4

Recession and Perspective

In this weeks lesson we are going to paint a simple coastal scene where we will build on the previous lessons about tone and tackle a subject that always impresses the viewer. We all I suspect like to stand on a rocky shore and watch the waves crashing in.

Waves of course follow the same rules of perspective as any other object, and if you think of them as lines they willl get progressively closer together the further they are away from you. Think of them like sleepers on a railway track as it goes into the distance. As in this diagram

So first step is to give ourselves a drawing to guide us when we applythe paint.

The most important thing in Watercolour painting is retaining the white of the paper. As we don't have white paint, this is most important, so we need to plan ahead to work out where we are going to need white paper.

So having established where we don't need to paint, we can lay in our first washes, starting with the sky, first we give a light wash of Raw Sienna to the lower part of the sky to warm it up a touch, then with a lightish wash of Ultramarine Blue which we fade in as we come down. Then a warm grey colour for the distant cliffs, this is a mix of Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna, you can vary how warm or cool your grey is by having slightly more of one colour or the other. Colour mixing is a skill that gets easier with practice, remember you can not get worse by lots of practice. The Nearer Rocks are warmer and of course stronger in tone. We can add a wash of Raw Sienna for the beach getting stronger on tone as it gets closer towards us.

The sea colour around will vary with a lot of factors, mainly the colour of the sky, though of course it is also affected by the seabed, which round here is muddy so greys things down a bit, in Cornwall where the water is clearer, if it is shallow you get the lovely turquoise colours similar to the foreign beaches you see in the tourist brochures. So we paint a light wash for our waves, leaving plenty of white paper, remember it's easier to paint over white paper than to try and get the paint back off! Where the nearest wave is just about to break we want a very pale yellow green colour. You should end up with something like this

While our sea is drying, that sounds odd, must be the Red Sea, I expect Moses is around here somewhere! We can add some dark paint to indicate our rocks in the foreground. Just random shapes, but you need to consider where the light is coming from. In this example it is coming from the right, so as the rocks go into the water on the right hand side they are in shadow. Sometimes it helps to screw your eyes up and squint to get a better idea of what you are doing, or step back from your painting.

We can now start adding washes of slightly stronger colour, varying the blue green mix to give variety, to strengthen the darker areas. Just think of shadows, and where the wave is about to curl over the water is nearly transparent so we need to keep those areas light. The darker parts are underneath the wave.

We continue to paint in a sort of random fashion to represent the different facets of waves, which is basically a reflective surface that is continually moving, don't forget the white streaks that you get as the waves come ashore. Reference to some good photographs is helpful when doing this sort of thing, or a very good memory. It is difficult watching waves as they are always moving, the more experience and observation you have of the thing you are painting, the better you will understand it and how to paint it. As Mr Balir would say, observation, observation, observation.

We now start to go in with our really strong darks to give some impact, and also add shadows to the white parts of the water where the wave has broken, I find a good colour for this is a bluish mauve, but keep it pale, it is easy to go back and strengthen it if you need to later after it has dried and it is easier to judge. Your finished painting should look something like this. This example is not a masterpiece and was never intended to be so, completed in about 30 minutes, but it gives the impression of a rough day, and we can see the perspective as the waves go off towards the horizon. Don't worry about taking longer, painting is not a time competetive sport

I hope you have enjoyed this exercise and can share my enthusiasm for my favourite subject. The sea is a constantly changing scene and offers endless variety and challenges for the artist to capture all it's moods. There are of course other ways to capture this so go ahead and experiment, find out what method works for you.

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