Claire asked about how to paint waterfalls, mist and water in watercolour. Although specific techniques may apply to watercolour, the overall approach is common to all media: the trick is to have a strategy for making the water resolve quite early in your painting.
Painting fast and falling water, spray and turbulence is a challenging subject in any media. The photo freezes the action and rarely provides a good guide to an effect that will really work.
The fundamental principal that I keep in mind is to keep the water separate from the surround in as many ways as possible:
- with white space;
- with a different palette;
- with different sorts of brush mark;
- and, hard edges impart stillness…rough or confused, turbulence.
Within these ideas have some fun – simply looking different from the surrounding land should “read” as water.
The following watercolour video makes good sense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ74Fk1XSms Although not stated, the paper is probably at about a 15 degree angle from horizontal. I’d probably tackle this image in a similar way, using similar colours.
I also liked this “Part 1” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB1Lxvz-Uts (Personally I would not do too much more than shown here and “Part 2” overworked the idea).
The common theme of both of these demonstrations is that the water is created by the rocks and trees surrounding – the water is “formed” by the bounded forms. Working into the water is kept simple and plenty of white space is protected! In the first video, the water colour is different from the rocks and the brush technique quite distinct too…the simpler the better. Using resist for spray as in the first (nicely integrated when the mask came off) makes all sorts of sense too!
As an example, in this painting most of the water is just plain white space: http://www.lianspainting.com/images/demo%20on%20web%2012/SahF-17.JPG
Finally, you want to create the impression of perspective with large marks in the foreground, progressively receding to smaller and less detail the further into the picture you go. Likewise, the green of the hills should grey out into the background.
Break-a-Brush!
David