Advancing with Watercolor: Italia "The City Square"

Fluency and the visual language

This week we continue to build on the cityscape with a more down to earth view of the Square - every village or city has a square , in fact the village seems to be built out from this center. I is by nature a lively place often flanked by churches, shops and restaurants …musicians gather in the evening to perform for the growing crowds. We look again at graded washes to help us in creating the light bouncing off of buildings and statues and other objects. Made of stone. Our first approach is through a tonal study. A study - or practice - using a single color. The tonal study is helpful for the artist to find a path through a complex subject. Because of its simple nature we can practice difficult subjects like architecture and people with more ease. We also get a chance to internalize our subject and understand a good process for building it up in watercolorI learned a few things in the creation of the tonal study that made it easier and more fluent in the color versionWhat will we do this week

A tonal study

We will start with a tonal version of our subject - using a single color - we create the graded washes more directly and build the painting easily from light to dark .The tonal study gives us a chance to practice our figures and important marks that we use to describe architecture, or experiment with other possibilities. The simplicity of the the tonal study also lets us think about ways to highlight the important areas as well as to identify potential problem areas in the painting. This week for example the area around the figures has the potential to be problematic - the use of dark against light helped to solve that problem…

The study is so important to engage our creative side. With the study , like a sketch the focus is on process and not so much on results. This means we are more likely to explore and try something that occurs to us - much more likely than when we are concerned with the final result as in the demo late on…