Advancing with Watercolor: "Snow Ride" The Vignette sharpens our design skills

The vignette is a term given to a method or methods used by designers and illustrators by which they use the white space of the page in interesting ways. - this suits us aa watercolorists as we often have to plan our technique based on using the white of the paper

Often these white or unpainted spaces are used together with text or descriptive content such as book covers or posters. There have been a number of artists to use the vignette as a unique way to design their paintings and sketches. We will look at a few today, also, I will give you a formula laid out by Watercolorist Tony Couch and show examples by Claude Croney, Joseph Zbukvic and Charles Reid


Reasons to try the Vignette

Painting with the thought of making a vignette encourages the artist to think of the overall design of the painting. Typically the artist starts with the main subject - and it can quite engaging placing the subject in the rectangle without painting edge to edge as we normally do. I find that I am instantly engaged in making and interesting shape out of my subject and so for me it is an important exercise.

Typically a good amount of white paper remains and the shape of the subject occupies most of the rectangle. Instead of painting edge to edge the subject at hand the first consideration seems to be the placement of the subject and adjoining elements and how that interacts with the white of the page.

The stress on design 

We practice design in connecting the main subject to the sides of the paper sometimes in an obvious manner such as in an adjoining tree sometimes in a less obvious a reflection or shadow. A lot of creativity comes out when executing a vignette and this will extend into our more formal painting as well.

The is form is more suited to the sketching as they tend to be more graphic and less about atmosphere or mood.

Lets embrace this idea for a short term and have some fun with a vignette approach to a subject