Advancing with Watercolor: Color and Transparency "The Pub"

Color - underpainting and transparency

What causes the pub to glow and shimmer? - is it the beer you had? Ha ha no no…watercolor is transparent so lets take full advantage of the transparency and make our interiors glow and shimmer

This week we look at compliments in colors - Red and Green to be specific and how we can take advantage of their complimentary nature through layering colors light to dark. We also look at the light and dark property of color and practice mixing transparent darks using the darker side of the palette.

For example, most of this interior is in shadow so the highlights become the energizer of this painting. The strength of the darks, and their complimentary nature make the lights vibrate that much more

This week we will practice using a limited palette - basically 2 greens and 2 reds. These colors are natural compliments and our first step is to identify them in our scene - notice the floating light green and red - colored light that diffuses into the darks and bounces of objects like the counter and our patrons. After observing and almost saying out loud the colors we begin  planning our palette. When choosing brushes for the first layer look at you large brushes . Once we have chosen the palette and the brushes we need a focal area. They eye needs an anchor and this image does not really have one - maybe that’s why I chose such a blurry photo :),,, I decide that some figures at the bar will hold the eye and create a strong narrative so the figures become my area of interest. Then I start by drawing them onto the watercolor paper…

What will we do this week

We start our practice this week with making color swatches. I’ve done this in previous weeks, but not a part of our meeting, these videos were uploaded as a complement to the lesson. This week we will create some color watches to gain some understanding of complementary Hughes and building, transparent darks.

I start by creating a grid on my paper, you can see it in the first illustration.

Then using the colors of the week I started to paint small squares across the length of the paper. This is a good exercise for coming to understand the tonal component of our colors. For example, we are using four colors and black to create this exercise, two reds and two greens. When we put them on our pallet, we realize there are light, red and light green, dark red and light green and dark green but dark? We answer that question in this exercise.

Mixing Darks

We do a variation of this exercise in the next sequence building up through layering these colors. We get instant feedback as to their transparent nature and potential for creating darks.

From these exercises, we move forward to painting our scene of the pub.