Vol 6. No More Blank Pages
In this post, some lessons from my 20-day project of painting with watercolors on toned paper.
Central Mass friends, I’ll be offering some work for sale at Taylor and Rae Studio in Princeton on October 21. Check out the event details here. Not in Central Mass but want to check out my art? My virtual studio sale is underway now on my website, dvmulligan.com. Now onto today’s post!
From September 1 through September 20, I participated in the Learn to Paint Podcast’s Fall #20for20ArtChallenge, as I discussed in my last post. Following Kelly Anne Powers’s instructions for the challenge, I set some clear goals for myself, including defining when I’d paint, for how long, and what materials I’d use.
My plan was simple: I’d do a 20-minute sketch every morning first thing in my homemade sketchbook. I randomly toned the pages in advance using Derwent Inktense paints, which are similar to watercolor in their appearance and feel while wet but are permanent when dry (unlike watercolor). I used two colors on every page and just painted random shapes and textures. I then chose one page for each day of the challenge and I painted on top of it with watercolor and watercolor pencil, using the tone on the page as an underpainting.
This is a technique I had wanted to try for a while, but I was a bit intimidated by it and unsure how it worked really. I saw works done in this manner and they had a freshness and vibrancy that I admired, but I just wasn’t confident I had the skills to work around colors and shapes already in place that might have nothing to do with my subject matter.
Still, one of my personal goals right now is to be bolder and more expressive in my paintings, to be less literal and more impressionistic, to learn to convey the feeling of a scene instead of merely transcribing it, and this technique seemed promising, so I decided to set aside 20 days for deliberately practicing it (See volume 5 for more thoughts on deliberate practice).
The results of my efforts have been surprising and exciting. I’m hooked on this technique! For one thing, I no longer have to face a blank page when I sit down to sketch. For another, the challenge of composing around some preexisting blocks of color has helped me to think about my light, middle, and dark values in new ways. And finally, the color choices I have to make when working with a toned page have pushed me to be more atmospheric.
If you’d like to take a peek inside my sketchbook, check out the video below.
Here are a few tips you can use if you want to try this in your own sketchbook:
Use either a pair of analogous colors or a pair of complementary colors.
I had great luck with both types of pairs. On pages where I painted with the analogous pairs of blue and green or yellow and orange, I painted organic subjects like flowers or a stream and plants. On pages where I used complementary pairs like yellow and purple, I found I could work with structures that had strong light and shadow.
I used Derwent Inktense paints because they look like watercolor but don’t reactivate once they are dry the way watercolor does. My favorite pairs were poppy and mango, plum and burnt yellow ochre, and ultramarine and sun yellow.
Use basic compositional schemes to place your colors.
Early on in my experiment, I found that I was drawn to pages where the underpainting was shaped like the building blocks of one- or two-point perspective. I could skim my photo references for street scenes and imagine how they would lay on top of the color shapes. This helped me feel less intimidated by the unfamiliarity of using pre-toned pages.
Another simple compositional trick that I found useful was to alternate horizontal bands of warm and cool color when toning the page. Then I could use that as the temperature structure of a sketch to create instant depth.
I will say that as I got more comfortable, I found it easier to go back and use my more random underpaintings, and a few of my favorite pages came about from those attempts. Over time I learned that there really is no wrong to tone a page and even the weirdest and most random underpaintings can be fun to work with. But, as a starting point, compositional building blocks are useful.
Stick to light values to tone the page and leave plenty of white space.
When toning your pages, use very watery washes of light to mid-values and leave plenty of white gaps. You want the tone to be dark enough to see underneath other transparent mediums but not so dark that you have weird, distracting hard edges showing through. Leaving some of the white on the page gives you room for your lightest lights without needing to add white on top later. This tip is really important for watercolor artists. If you are going to use acrylic, gouache, or pastel, you can be bolder in the underpainting.
Use granulating watercolors.
To really make the most of your underpainting, use moderately to heavily textured paper and granulating pigments. It’s so satisfying to let the toned page glow through the painting.
Set a timer and stick to it.
Give yourself at most 30 minutes for a sketch. Set a timer and force yourself to work fast. It’s all too tempting to perfectly jigsaw your underpainting and painting together, matching up lines just so, fitting things in perfectly, and making a tight, fearful mess of things in the process. The goal here is to stay loose, so you have to work fast. Healthy pressure from a clock is good. Do as little drawing with a pencil or pen as possible before painting your big shapes. You can always draw on top later if you need more detail. Think about suggesting rather than defining. And remember, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.”
Be prepared to add opaque white on top.
This was hard for me. I am so used to planning my watercolor paintings to preserve my whites. I seldom use masking fluid or lifting techniques. Instead, I plan. But when you are using this method, sometimes you have to have some opaque white—gouache, acrylic, oil pastel, etc.—handy to restore the lightest values. I had to experiment a lot to see what white media in my toolkit would actually cover the Inktense. My best tool was white gouache.
Have fun!
If it’s not fun, why do it? Give yourself permission to be messy, silly, whimsical, and downright absurd, and then let your inner child loose on the page.
Have you tried painting on pre-toned paper?
Share your experience, tips, and tricks in the comments! I’d to hear your thoughts and keep the conversation going. And if you have an artist-friend who might like this post, please share. It really helps me out :)