How to get the right paint and water ratio

May 10, 2017 in Technique, Fundamental

Water is essential to watercolor. You loosen and dilute the paint by adding water to it. It is also water that makes watercolor transparent. The right paint and water ratio is directly related to the value and the opacity. It can be a bit tricky to get it right at first, but it will eventually become part of your instinct with enough practice and some observation. Unfortunately I can not help you with the practice part, but I can provide you some tips to help you along the way. Obviously, the dryer the mixture, the more intense the color. But there are some other things that can give you an idea how wet is your mixture...

How to develop your own color set

April 05, 2017 in Fundamental, Technique

When you walk around the paint section of an art store, you can often see some artists' color sets such as this 10 colors watercolor set from Alvaro Castagnet. It's very interesting to see the choice of paints that each artist uses. But as you progress, I strongly suggest you develop your own sense of color. But how do you do that?

I enjoy cooking at home. I love making Taiwanese cuisines for my wife, pasta and fried chickens for my kids, some spicy dishes for myself. I started to search for receipts on websites and YouTube. At first, I follow the receipt closely when prepping the meal. I try to put the exact amount of spices and ingredients at the right time, watch for the temperature, and I even try to use the brand of sauce they suggested. However, as I getting more familiar with cooking, I started to venture out and tweak the receipt to my liking. I can make the dish a bit spicier, sweeter, or less greasy. Sometimes I have to change the receipt because there are one or more ingredients that someone in my family is allergic to!

Similar to cooking receipts, there are tons of books and tutorials about color mixing. While they can be helpful and informative, I called them "formula". There's nothing wrong with formulas or receipts. It's great when you are looking for a starting point. But the difference between a cook and a chef is that a chef has his/her own receipts! Same for an artist, you need to develop your own set of a palette. It is ok that you start off with someone else's palette, but you should eventually build your own color set from it. There are a few suggestions I want to share with you that can hopefully help you to develop your own color set:

Train your eyes - If you really think about it, the colors that we see are all transmitted by the light. We are merely trying to capture the light with pigments and chemicals. The mixing formulas are the colors that another person sees. Train your own eyes to be more sensitive and identify the colors that you see. Push those colors you identified and try to recreate those in your palette.
Trust your eyes, not the formula - When your eyes gets more sensitive and trained, you will be able to judge the colors more accurately. That's the time when you should trust your eyes more than the formula! Like a chef should taste his/her own cooking, the artists should trust his/her own eyes for their own mixing. The formula is only a starting point, it's up to you to make the color warmer, cooler, redder or bluer.
Express what you know, not what you see - Ever wonder why the artists mix their color a certain way and it looks great? That's because they are mixing the colors based on what they know! The portrait that I painted from the above is based on a photo I found on Instagram. If you see the reference photo you will see my color looks different from the photo. My skin tone is lighter and I added some blues that are not present in the photo. I paint with what I know, instead of just what I see. You are a painter, not a copy machine or a camera. Painting what you know is very important, and that's also what makes your paintings personal and unique!

If you haven't, I encouraged you to read one of my previous blog post about mixing different shades of grey. Hopefully it'll get you started with a limited colors. Work your way up and add more colors to your palette and have fun with it! Learn from other artists' way of color mixing, but always aim to develop your own color set!

New Painting Video

I'm exciting to share with you my new YouTube painting video! This is the first figure painting video I uploaded, and also the first video that I used an extra camera for my palette! Enjoy!

Painting speed is not a skill, it's aquired by experience

March 01, 2017 in Fundamental, Principles and Value

Quite similar to the loose style that I got quite a few emails about, painting fast is not a style nor a skill. We live in such a hurry today, and quite often we want things fast: Email over a hand written letter, people read the headline and come to conclusion instead of study deeper, we stream videos online instead of physically go to a Blockbuster and pick up a movie. Granted, many of these changes are for the better, we are able free up more time for things are more important. But many people in this generation started to weight speed more than quality.

A believable painting has believable scale

November 30, 2016 in Fundamental, Technique

One of the problem I often see in an unsuccessful painting is incorrect scale. A believable scale is essential especially when you are painting a scenery with figures and man made objects. Sometime I see paintings with cars that's way too small compares to the figure next to it, or a building that looks like 4 stories tall but in reality it was suppose to be 10 stories. In this case, drawing is very important to get the right scale and placement. When you are drawing, go through the following steps to get an accurate scale:

1. Find a scale reference

In most cases, a person is a perfect scale reference, because that's what we see everyday. For most of the cityscape, you can measure almost anything with the size of a figure. Why? because city is build by man, for the size of an average man. If in your painting reference there's no figure, then find something that's related to a figure: handrail, trash can, or car. You can really get close and detail when doing a figure. A figure is typically about 7 and 1/2 head length. So from a head length to a figure, and from a figure to the surrounding. Everything is relative to another in scale.

Measure and compare

Now that you have a scale reference, start measuring things you draw by it. In this simple drawing, it shows the scale of the car relative to the figure. Most car is a bit shorter than an average person's shoulder level. You can double check that scale relationship next time when you are about to enter a car. Of course, there are different type of cars with different height level, a mini van can be as tall as a person while a moving truck can be 2+ people tall. But what ever you have in your scene, having a scale reference will enable you to measure just about everything. I also eyeball the height of the traffic light pole since I have a pretty good idea how much taller it should be now that I have a basic scale reference of a figure and a car.

Checking the scale in depth

It is likely that your scenery will have depth. I won't go into the importance of perspective, but it is important to know to measure your scale in different depth level. In a typical street scene, the horizon is at the head of the figure since it's at your eye level. The figures in the distance will become smaller and shorter while sharing the same eye level. This little drawing shows how the same figure looks in different depth level. And we can use it as the scale reference for the car at that depth.

It might feel a bit tedious to check your scale for everything at first. But as you do more drawings/paintings, you will be able to pick up the scale relationship much faster. Next week I will continue to talk about scale and how to create drama in your painting by playing with scale.