Advancing with Watercolor: Winter Meditations "Golden Light"

Edges  - Golden Light or Glare

This week we continue with our winter meditation and lo recreate a low golden light or glare as our main subject. To do this we use a combination of wet technique and dry technique. These produce soft edges and hard edges. The main though behind these methods is to achieve gradation. When we use gradation all sorts of effects can be rendered - including the most dramatic

Today we will use gradation to build the sky and the birch forest - first in a drill and then into a full painting

What will you need this week

I decided - primarily because of the layout of the image to use a strong vertical piece of paper - this also suits the subject of tall trees and long shadows - the paper is Saunders Waterford and cut roughly 8 x 16. In the drill I use a larger square sheet to do 2 studies in preparation for the demo

I am using cad yellow light, yellow ochre, cad orange red, burnt Sienna, cobalt and and some titanium white  in creating my mixtures. Again - use what you have.

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

This weeks Drill

This weeks drill we will practice some wet into wet technique to create the gradations of the sky

first through layers our primaries of yellow red and blue onto a wet page. Care must be taken especially  in adding the 3rd layer of blue that you so not “wash out” the previous layers I find it very helpful to practice this apart from any reference to be able to give 100% or your attention to whats happening on the paper.

In the second part we look at isolated graded washes representing Birch trees.

Starting with the length of the tree using a 1/2” wide brush we paint a long vertical shape = then while it is still wet we add color …primarily to the north and south parts…