Watercolour techniques for landscape art
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When painting a landscape, the first step is to create a sketch, which will help you maintain a clean painting and focusing on details. No matter if you inspire from a picture or if you are in front of the subject, you have choose what elements you should keep or ignore in your composition. A good composition is the key for a satisfactory result, and if you aim for perfection, learning how to use the elements in your composition is crucial.
A landscape painting should contain a centre of interest, which can be enhanced by using value contrast or a touch of pure colour. The centre of interest should be painted with the strongest colours, better if they are complementary so will make the area look vibrating. It should occupy a good portion in the working area, and will loosen from the detailing and colour intensity when connected with the background. The centre of interest in your landscape should be situated in the foreground, considering that the area distant from the viewer is cooler and less intense. Very skilled painters often use more than one centre of interest, which creates more effect to a landscape painting. When using two centres of interests, it is best to avoid to place them on top of the other one or vertically, and to place them diagonally or horizontally, and one of the two centres of interest should be of stronger interest. The centres of interest should be connected with the rest of the landscape and avoided the cropped effect. A landscape painting should attract the viewer, and should transmit a feeling, most commonly the painting express the emotional state of the artist in the moment of painting, so if you feel dynamic and exuberant then consider painting a rainy landscape, a waterfall, your painting would transmit some of your energy to the viewer and will have a greater impact.
One other of the many watercolour techniques for landscape art is the lightning effect. Lightening is very important to brighten up your watercolour painting, and artists often exaggerate the brightness of an object or add their own imaginative touch even if it distorts the atmospheric perspective.
To create a 3D effect landscape on a 2D surface you have to consider creating the atmospheric depth, which is the second step when starting a painting. After you have created the sketch, you have decided over your final composition, you should take a big watercolour brush and start with sketching the atmospheric depth, by painting a washed blue all over the page, to cool the lightened areas from the background. The lightening and the shadows in the foreground should be warmer and more intense and in the background, where painting the far away objects as mountains, the contrast should be low, there will be no details and the predominant colours are mixings of blue, a mixture of orange and blue results a grey I’m personally very satisfied about. When painting a sun shine, the violets and oranges used should be cooled with blue. The elements represented far away should be smaller, should overlap with the objects situated in the middle ground.
This is a painting I’ve made inspired by Hala Sultan Tekke, a touristic church situated in the Salt Lake area in Cyprus.
I started with a fast sketch in crayon, delimitating the shape of the building and the area around, to avoid making mistakes when working with watercolours.
I prefer to express my own style when painting, so I let my hand draw freely inspired by my own emotions and even if sometimes my drawings are not perfect, the most important for me is to express my style and my emotions which I believe is the secret of creating an original art. I believe each painter’s work must be original, easy to identify so when watching a thousands of art pieces, you can recognise somebody’s style because the artist uses specific colours, textures and details in a personal way, making easy for the viewers to recognise his signature art.
The picture above it is a sketch of the Hala Sultan Tekke situated in Cyprus, I didn’t want my painting to have a realistic look but a modern style so I didn’t accentuated too many details, leaving myself free to decide at the end of the painting how I will transform it into a mysterious watercolour landscape.
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Author Resource:-
Read full article about Watercolour techniques for landscape art at the personal site of Elena Movileanu personal site.
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By :
nikolas andreou
Submitted
2011-12-14 21:19:35 |
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