HOW TO PAINT IN WATERCOLOUR

How to Make the Faraway, Look Far Away

And the close, Close

This picture of fir trees (left) is an example of painting distance and depth.

It is clear the trees go back a long way. It’s all in the painting.

The firs at the back would be green if we were standing right in front of them. They’d be green in the same way the ones at the front are green. But because they’re further away, they look bluish, or greyish, or shadowy.

That blue/grey lets the viewer know the trees are far away. It’s to do with the way that light behaves. Well, it could be to do with pollution and other factors, too. The important thing to know is that if distant things are painted that colour the viewer unconsciously knows they’re over there, while we’re still right here.

One of the most useful colours for painting distant things, whether trees, mountains, fields, or buildings, anything-faraway, is what I call ‘shadow-colour’. This is a mix of Ultramarine Blue and Light Red.

To do a simplified painting in which to use shadow-colour to indicate distance, start with a sky as in ‘Paint a Sky in Watercolour’.

Mix up some Light Red on your palette.

Add Light Red to Ultramarine Blue. Try it out on scrap paper. There is a very wide range of colours between Light Red, a mix, and Ultramarine Blue — just some are illustrated above on scrap paper.

For distant hills a pale shadow-colour is required — (try it on scrap paper) — as above. Then, when happy with the colour, paint in the far away mountain range, preferably with just one or two sweeps of the brush so the paint underneath is not disturbed, and so the colour remains clear and doesn’t go muddy.

Then, with a darker shadow-colour, when the first sweep of paint has dried, paint in the nearer hills/fields.

With a clean, damp/wet brush, sweep along the bottom of the second layer of paint to soften it, so there is no hard line of paint left on the paper — in the same way as with the sky in this session.

When dry, trees, using the same shadow-colour, can start to go in. Using your hake — or another flat brush — practice using it on its edge on scrap paper to make ‘tree trunks’ — see above. This technique can be used for anything straight — fence posts, telegraph poles etc. Then practice using the ‘corner’ of the brush for the foliage.

Once happy with your fir trees on scrap paper, paint them onto your painting.

The furthest trees were put in first and then nearer, darker shadow-colour trees were put on top of them. Remembering the ‘Odds are Better than Evens’ session, make them different heights and differently spaced out.

So, I got carried away with my trees and completely obliterated the far hills …

I shall do it again leaving a hill in view so that there is a distant land mass, as well as distant trees, and nearer ones.

For my second pic (above), I used Raw Sienna as well as Ultramarine Blue in the sky as I have in ‘Paint a Sky in Watercolour’, to give a different mood.

I also introduced a different colour — green. Because there is green in the example picture at the top of this page.

Green can always be mixed from various blues and various yellows but, in this case I’ve used a tube of green — the first one I found in my box of odd-tubes-I-don’t-use-very-often, was Hooker’s Dark Green (above).

However, out of its tube, on scrap paper, it’s too ‘green’ for my liking, so I mixed in some shadow-colour (above) to get a more appropriate green for this pic (above right).

The ‘grass’ on the right above is painted with the hake — hold it on its edge the same as for painting tree trunks, only horizontally, and then flick it upwards. Practice on scrap first.

This time, I remembered to leave a hill on show, behind the distant trees. Yay!

All these sessions, so far, can be done in one go. They don’t have to be, though, if you don’t have the time — there are natural breaks when waiting for a layer to dry. If the layers aren’t drying fast enough, you can use a hair dryer to help them along.

The following sessions are all useful for the one above:

Next up is painting a ‘Communing with the Moon’ type pic, as above.

All paintings and photos by © Susan Alison 2021

My Amazon Author Page:

My Etsy Store:

Susan Alison’s Amazon Author Page |Susan’s Etsy Store | Susan’s website