Turner’s Watercolours

I’m featuring an English painting this week.  I’m pretty sure JMW Turner was the most influential painter from the British isles, at least until modern times. His influence on the Impressionists, Modernism and Abstraction generally, is massive. His presence in popular culture, at least in the UK, is unprecedented, what with The Turner Prize, portrayal in film and even today,  appearing on bank notes.

Turner was renowned for not having a fixed technique and instead, moved the paint around intuitively and with varying degrees of wetness. I would not recommend trying to  replicate the paintings – if he tried the same compositions again they would probably look different! That said, here’s a watercolour where I used a Turner reference:

I started with the sky, trying to capture “that” light and then worked the dark over the top until the image resolved. I was more precise with the tower. I worked with the paper vertical (it was a demo), however Turner almost certainly tilted his paper as he saw fit! 

I remember reading once that Turner worked on 3 or 4 watercolours at a time. Dunking them in a bucket of water, and putting them on the floor – moving around, working on the one that was at just the right degree of wetness.

Watercolour Washes

We’ll leave the mysteries of Turner’s technique and focus on the essentials for creating vibrant effects. Watercolour relies on being able to wash transparent paint one over the other. This week we’ll look at some fundamental wash techniques and try a watercolour scene. Watercolour washes have a mystique all of their own!

Uniform wash

There is a wide range of approaches to creating a uniform wash. Some artists wet the paper first (like Turner apparently), some keep the paper perfectly flat, some use a square brush. However you work, the key is the same:

1. Just the right amount of water that on one hand keeps the paint from drying with hard edges and on the other hand pooling and drying like an old salt lake.
2. Then a smooth rhythm to apply the paint. 

Here’s how I proceed:

Continuing on with the same theme, you can now wash one colour over another:

Notice the effect is a vibrant green, as we found in last week’s glazed colour grid

There are plenty of demonstration videos on fluid washes on the web – I thought you might find these interesting:

1. The first artist covers fluid washes quickly and appears to be not too worried about technique. She uses a flat brush and covers wet-on-wet quite nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbVFoEXTNs0
2. Watching this second video, you can see the artist prefers a flat brush and more organized brush passes, to cover a large area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jPanPCfYMk
3. A third artist uses a small round brush and lot’s of small movements – with fine success: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdGMi-OMCrg

So flat or round brush, large or small, the key is to work quickly and “pull the wet” area down the page (they all start at the top). It’s worth practicing this before commencing an actual painting. Let me know what technique works best for you!

Graduated Washes

You might regularly want to moderate the strength of your wash to fade out the colour, often termed a graduated wash. I use the same technique as with the uniform wash,  adding water as I go in order to dilute the colour. Here we go:

Exercise

1. Try three swaths of uniform washes on a sheet of watercolour paper: Alizarin crimson, Ultramarine blue and Lemon yellow (all transparent) would be good choices although it does not matter which pigments you choose.
2. Let the paper dry, turn the paper around on it’s side and repeat the washes over the top. A classic glazing effect!
3. Quiz questions: Which colours now predominate? Which areas show the most vibrancy? (There’s no right or wrong, it’s an exercise in observation)

Notes on Transparency

Transparency is key for overlaying washes. It’s fine to start with an opaque pigment however subsequent washes are best built up with transparent paint. I will typically use the transparent Ultramarine blue over the more opaque Cerulean for example, Likewise, Lemon yellow over Cadmium yellow. Alizarin Crimson over Cadmium red. Refer to our glazed colour grid from Week 4!

The following website has some good information. (Scroll down for watercolour): https://www.celebratingcolor.com/color-transparency-and-opacity/

Notes on staining and non-staining pigments:

When starting watercolours, I use exclusively non-staining colours to enable some local removal (lifting) of pigment: you can test for this by applying brush and water to some dry swaths of pigment.

Here’s the list of non-staining pigments on my palette: Cadmium Red, Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue, Cerulean Blue, Cadmium Yellow, Yellow Ochre and Hansa Yellow (lightly staining).

The staining pigments I avoid at this stage are: all purples, Pthalo blue (like the plague), and Lemon Yellow. I don’t use green, however many are staining: pthalo being an often-used constituent.

Remember your colour theory

All this is for naught if you wash across the colour wheel, one complement onto another, at least without planning. Although you might get some interesting effects, washing yellow over purple is going to result in something in the grey zone! Typically washes are safer between primaries, think: orange zoned, green zoned, and purple zoned.

Application to Sunsets and Sunrises

Uniform and graduated washes have wide applicability, and any kind of sunrise or sunset are great  examples. With any vista, a good plan is to start with both the sky and land before moving on to other details.

I often start with washes of yellow, perhaps surrounded by oranges shifting to crimsons and on to purples and ultramarine. The key is to to keep the yellows away from the blues as you don’t want greens forming….hence the chromatic progression. A mild greenish tinge in places does no harm but you don’t want green to predominate. I’d probably use Cadmium yellow (opaque), then Alizarin crimson (transparent) and Utramarine blue (also transparent) with oranges and purples formed through secondary mixing.

The dark foreground and shore should go in nicely on top of the washed background. I’d consider perhaps making a colour distinction between mid-ground shore and reflection and the foreground. I wouldn’t be afraid of using cooler darks and certainly a deep purplish tinge will contrast with those light yellows – the biggest contrast in the book actually – both high complement and value contrasts.

Example of starting a painting with washes

Here I’m working on a vertical surface for demonstration purposes. I’d recommend rather keeping your work at a 15 to 20 degree angle – as in the wash demonstrations above.

Exercise

1. In watercolour, develop the initial painting using washes for the major areas. Don’t follow your initial drawing (if any) slavishly, but rather look to your reference and evolve the painting accordingly.
2. Optionally, finish the painting with detail using line and pure colour. Always have an eye to keeping a strong balance of values.