Gallery of Watercolour Backgrounds
Live Sketching Event last week
Last Thursday I attended a local gallery opening in Tavira and did some live sketching at the event. You can see the original sketches from A Borboleta here. I was happy with the sketches, and more than one person who saw me sketching remarked that I sketched really quickly. It’s taken me years to get comfortable with sketching this quickly, and now it’s become second nature it seems like the most natural thing to do.
I love the rush of sketching quickly, and not getting over concerned with perfectionism or creating a perfect sketch each time. When I sketch, I want to capture a moment. I much prefer sketching people, because you just have to get stuck in and sketch, there’s not time to think. On the other hand, when you sketch buildings, they’re just so static. And with time to sketch, it’s a lot easier to obsession about creating a perfect sketch, because the sense of urgency to capture the scene isn’t there.
Adding Loose Skies to Building Sketches
One thing I do love about sketching buildings is adding a loose and dynamic sky. I don’t want to paint little puffy clouds and a realistic sky, I’d much rather create a loose watercolour mix of different watercolour blues, that can merge together organically to create a semi-abstract sky. I like the feeling of movement these kind of skies create, and I think it is a pleasing balance to the static nature of the buildings.
This sky was a mix of Cobalt Blue and Manganese Blue Hue, mixed on the page so they merged together, and created depth and interest. It’s taken me a while to be able to create a sky I’m happy with every time, and now it’s time to experiment with different colours for the backgrounds behind the people I sketch.
Adding Loose Skies to People Sketches
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to inject that same feeling of movement and interest into my people sketches. I sketch people, almost every day. And mostly I leave the backgrounds white, because most of the sketches are just for people-sketch practice, and not intended as an art piece. But when I was looking at my live event sketches of people I did last week, I realised they would really benefit from some dynamic backgrounds.
I’m usually concerned that a background is going to ruin the sketch, so I don’t bother. But as I’d already taken photos of all the sketches, it didn’t really matter if my backgrounds ruined the sketches. I also thought it’d be a good practice adding dynamic backgrounds to small images. I’ve been seeing the Instagram posts by Mette Lehmann, and she uses bright colours to create loose and interesting watercolour backgrounds to her people sketches (I’ll post about her work in the coming weeks), and she’s inspired me to find my own style for these backgrounds.
I started off by practicing on some loose bits of paper – there’s only one I really liked, the rest ended up in the bin.
For this examples I followed this formula:
- Paint Wet-in-Wet and use a large mop brush
- Added a couple of pure colours to let them mix and mingle on the page
- Added a little bit of a third colour
- Added some splashes onto the damp paper
- Leave to dry naturally
This method seemed to work the best, so I moved forward with adding backgrounds to all of my live sketches using different combinations of colours and a variation on this method to create variegated backgrounds and force watercolour cauliflowers (also called blooms or back-runs).
Dark to Light Background
I love this combination of Natural Sienna clothing and a blue background. I only used cobalt blue for the background, but I added a second layer around the figure so that the darker area seems to recede and it gets lighter as we move towards the outer edges. I softened the edges we clean water. I like this effect of dark to light background.
I used the same dark to light on these two sketches. On the sketch on the right I only used one colour, but on the right-hand sketch I started with a Hansa Yellow Light layer, and then added a green layer that was made from the same yellow. So not only did the colour saturation fade as I added more water, the colour changed to a lighter one. I’d like to play around with this technique more, as I look of the fading saturation and fading colours towards the edges.
These are more examples of playing around with fading the colour and saturation. Some of them didn’t work so well because I didn’t have enough water on the page which means the paint doesn’t merge and mingle as effortlessly.
For the man in the green hat I dropped in clean water on top of the paint to get the paint to disperse and create lighter areas. If you add this with when the paint is still wet and transient, with merges together and settles like this, but if you add a wetter layer onto of a lightly drier layer, it’ll cause a cauliflower effect.
Background with Cauliflower Effect
I know watercolour purists will do whatever they can to make sure they don’t get cauliflower effects in their paintings, but I love this effect, and at times struggle to get it to happen. For both of these sketches I used Opera Pink and Hansa Yellow Light and used a lot of water to mix them on the paper. Then when it was still damp I dropped a more water mix of paint to create the cauliflower. The sketch on the left was more successful than the sketch on the right. These cauliflowers add an extra level of interest and areas of brightness to the sketch.
In the right hand sketch I also experimented with using a more variegated wash (pinker on the bottom, more yellow on the top half). What also adds interest in this sketch is being able to see the multiple layers (at the bottom) with varying degrees of lightness and saturation. The background is a bit overpowering, but without it, these sketches are a bit uninteresting, but if I was planning on using these background colours again, I’d adjust the colour of the clothing so that they were more complimentary.
Chubby Pigments
Depending on the colour, the actual size of the pigment granuals can vary. The heavier the pigment, the quicker it’ll fall and settle on the page. Part of the joy of mixing colours on the page is discovering how different pigments work with each other. The more I do this background experimentation, the more I’m going to learn which colour combinations will create the most pleasing effects.
