Advancing with Watercolor: A Color Key "Boats in Harbor"

Color - When striving for mood - The key is the key

Color can stir the emotion - bright color and high contrast make us feel excited, lower contrast and grayed color meditative..It is interesting that we can affect someone’s mood through our painting. As artists we can paint more interpretively and there are useful working thoughts to help us do this

Value Key

Remember our value scale from a couple of weeks back? Now we look at this same scale only restrict it in a way that concentrates on the high end and the low end.

In this weeks lesson we will look at 2 extremes

High Key Painting

Are painting where the values or lights and darks reside in the upper end of the ball scale Low Key Paintings are paintings that are done in the lower value scale

Examples

So why would you want to paint in a high key? 

High Key painting allows the artist to use brighter purer color - color with higher chroma - to achieve a light mood that lifts the spirit and fill us with calmness,

High key paintings are a pleasure to look at and the high key paintings appear to produce a glimmering sunlight - this is one of the reasons that the impressionists gravitated to high key style - they feel as though they were painted in bright sunlight.

Care must be taken when expressing shadows or darker elements in the high key painting - typically these are painted with midtowns in pure color that complimentary in hue. When painting High key paintings you rely more of color harmony to create interest rather than tonal contrast seen in a full range key

Also, when you compress your values, you are usually painting outside of the way things ordinarily appear. Instead of painting what you see, you are painting the relationships you see between values. Not necessarily harder - just different. 

Low key paintings utilize colors the lower (darker) end of the value range. So your darks will be around black and your lights will be around the middle value range. 

LOW KEY PAINTING

Low key paintings are on the opposite side of the value scale and produce a different mood all together. They are typically low light painting, depicting twilight or dusk, or even nocturnes. Typically most of the painting is done with grays of various sorts with small areas of light interspersed to create drama. The tonalists painted mostly in with a low key palette

Examples

Low key paintings create a more meditative introspective mood that has little relation to the bright airy paintings done in the high key I like low key paintings for their moodiness and quietness. I feel there is a depth there missing from high key paintings but that is my view - each artist need to follow their own path and find their own voice.

For the watercolor artist The low key can be a particular challenge - our  colors depend upon the white of the paper to come through.

WHAT WILL YOU NEED THIS WEEK

We will start with a few new supplies

In addition to watercolor paper pencil, and masking tape a straight edge and an exacto blade  for cutting the tape into thin strips

COLORS

Yellow ochre, cad yellow light, and quinacrine gold, cad orange red, b Sienna

Cobalt blue and ultramarine blue plus Jaune brilliant

BRUSHES

A large flat 2” and a 1 inch flat, a couple of sabelette rounds large and small..

Tape, spay bottle, paper towel, hair dryer

What will we do this week

We start with a drawing - see the first plate - then we start to cut thin strips of masking tape to place on the masts of our boats (see plates 2-4). We place these well before we start to paint. We start painting the bright warm hues of the boats and some reflections

The while the lower section is wet we work up a mixture of Ult blue and b Sienna - trying to capture the soft reflections..