Consider Contour Drawing
Recently I had a limited time to paint, but I have committed to practice and put some miles on my brush. I think having a small time slot helps you focus. This day I had about 1.5 hours and spent the first hour working on a sketch that was not working (a work truck pulled up and parked in the middle of the landscape I was painting).
With a half hour left, I could just pack up and go home or give it another try. I pivoted 90 degrees and found another subject and did a quick contour drawing of the Irvine Railroad Station in Irvine Regional Park. In a contour drawing one puts the pencil on the paper, draws the entire subject in a continuous line without lifting the pencil ……. just keep drawing, connecting one shape to the next shape. This exercise of moving your pencil across the subject will surprise you. It will help you in the following ways:
It develops big shapes for your painting
It helps you keep the scale in your drawing as you compare where one shape starts and where it connects to the next shape
It creates a painterly quality since you don’t get hung up on having things exactly perfect.
After a quick drawing I pushed a light wash of raw sienna and quint gold across the tree line and the building. This would serve as my base color and lightest value in the painting. I should pause here to say that pushing a “light wash” across the tree lines and building lines is not easy. A new and possibly an intermediate watercolor painter will be so concerned with maintaining the integrity of the shapes they will want to stay within the lines. I have spent 10 years trying to protect my shapes on the initial wash, this approach leads to a fractured painting with white halos around each shape. Consider, if this initial wash is my lightest value, I can recover the shape when I lay in the darker values over the top and do some negative painting around my lighter value shapes. (Assuming the pencil lines from the contour drawing are dark enough to find when I go back with the second wash) Don’t get discouraged, I have heard many of my teachers explain this initial wash across all the shapes as you change from warm to cool colors, and I just wasn’t getting it. I was focused on painting each object, rather than squinting down and finding my big shapes.
Since I had little time, I needed to simplify my values with a light, medium and dark and limit the color pallet. The three main colors were Prussian blue, raw sienna and quint gold, I did use some cobalt blue in the sky. I was tempted to use some cadmium red for the train station, as it was the local color. But when you squint down to find your dark values the red color disappears, and I stayed wit the Prussian blue mix for the darks. Sticking with these 3 main colors automatically created color harmony and kept me thinking big shapes and looking for the value changes.
This was a good half hour of training my eye to see value changes and to practice my contour drawing. My takeaway was realizing how nicely contour drawing and watercolor complemented each other. You should try it!