Latest Watercolor Exercises

These two watercolor sketches are from the first two weeks of the fall session at Manifest. I'm pretty happy with the progress overall.

I've been trying to work in a bolder looser fashion. I'm also trying to forfeit a lot of control to the medium itself, which parodoxically gives the illusion of control in the final result.

These imperfect reproductions were taken with a point and shoot camera. I'll try to get scanned versions later —tiling them takes hours.

Seated Female Figure

I painted this one on Tuesday at Manifest. I wish had been more attentive to the proportions, but I think my handling of the watercolor has improved, and I'm reaching for a greater diversity of marks. This time, I added shadows with very watery layers of red and purple, which I think creates that luminosity that one expects from watercolor. It's a lighter piece overall —I generally prefer more darks —but appropriately soft for a nude female figure at rest.

Male Profile

This is a detail from a larger sketch of a male model. His expression came out a bit angry-looking. Probably a result of my caricaturing his brow a little.

I'm still evaluating this one. I like some of the details: the ear and sideburns, and the crazy tuft of hair, but some more control of the values and gradations in the flesh tones would help a lot. The shadow under the chin particularly bugs me.

Reclining Female

More practice with watercolor figures. I'm trying to allow the drawing underneath to play a larger role in the final piece.

I prefer the detail of the upper body, but here's the full piece below anyway:

Backside

Another attempt at controlling watercolor.

I'm obviously not in full command of where the water will take the pigment, but I can control roughly, the shape of the individual marks as well as their value. When you can orchestrate shapes and values, you can begin to create the illusion of a 3-dimensional forms on your paper, so it's a start. Another thing I can control is the composition in pencil before I go to the wet media. Admittedly, this composition is not particularly exciting —I chose the back view to give myself a better exercise in modeling the human form in watercolor.

I'm happy with the marks in the folds of the blue cloth, and I kinda like that little bit of her right arm where the shadow picks up a bit of reflected red light.

Watercolor

Three weeks ago I decided to switch media. Not because I was bored with pastel —quite the opposite, as I feel I've barely begun to mine their potential. For years I've been meaning to improve my skill in using watercolor —forcing myself to paint the figure in this challenging medium should help a lot. After two lackluster attempts, I decided to move to a larger sheet of paper and put in lighter washes relying a bit more on my graphite linework. This is the result.



The colors got lighter as they dried (something I'm going to have to get used to.) So I may have to revisit this, giving more attention to the modeling of the hands and softening the bare pate. Darkening the background should help as well.