Advancing with Watercolor: Street Vendors, NYC" Telling a Visual Story with Watercolor

THE PROJECT

We have been working with figures in several projects this far, the dog walker, rainy day NYC and as a general way to create the city “feel”. This week we are creating a common scene in NYC - street Vendors. They are on most corners and offer the bustling masses something tasty to keep them going. So lets use that as our story line

THE DRILL

In the drill I walk you through some of the decisions I made to after what I was seeing, with the goal of making the scene more understandable and readable. I changed the contrast and moved the figures - and played with a couple of scenarios to give you an idea that we work on top of what nature or a photograph gives us. Developing our image to suit the story or impression we want to leave.

The photo plays a role in this lesson. It is actually a difficult photo, not one we would normally select, but with some interesting shapes. This is intentional on my part to force us into a more creative stage of mind. What makes it a difficult photo is that the darks and mid tones are to close together and so on first glance it is hard to make anything sense out of the image. In this case it may be the camera, or the light, the result is a bad photo. Sometimes this happens in out=r own work also - we become focused on the smaller parts of the painting and our painting ends up looking flat and muddy. Never fun. Usually the culprit is the way we have built our painting forgetting about our focus and making everything the same...

THE DRAWING / DESIGN

In looking more closely at the photo I can pull out a surprising number of interesting elements. Their placement is good so lets use these elements as we start to draw our subject

1 - The background is mostly trees easy enough to put those in

2 - The foreground is mostly shadows on a path - we could gray them out but that might be tedious and counter productive...more on that later :)

3 the mid ground - Here is where we can spend time placing our figures and the vendors cart. Creating a story line, and a waiting line for those delicious hot dogs

THE TECHNIQUE

In thinking about technique I consider again - “Where do I want the eye to rest” . This is more like the beginning of the story - we want something to be interested enough that we spend time to learn more. This is the area where I will use hard edges or dry technique. - In the background I will use more lost and found edges - or wet technique, and the same in the foreground - dappled shadows with lost and found edges...Once the paper dries I will return to my main subject and work with hard edges to contrast the soft edges...

THE CHALLENGE

The challenge in this piece was in the conception.
How to make this reference photo work as a painting?
Experience plays a greater role in this and allows us to see a finished painting in

our subject. Still even at the early stages we can begin to involve our imagination in our painting as we would any other tool and create some order from chaos

THE SKILL

We are putting all our skills to work in this piece
1 - Engaging our minds yet or imagination to find possibilities
2 - working with wet into wet technique send developing our sense of timing 3 - more work with figures and story telling