Almighty painter

Chapter 435 Professional Watercolor (Happy New Year!)

(I wish all readers a happy New Year and good luck in the Year of the Dragon!)

The clouds Gu Weijing painted this time included both, with the former being the main one, so he paid more attention to the practice of brushwork.

He lightly dipped the tip of his brush into some water.

This box of Rembrandt's master watercolor paints in Teacher Wattel's studio has just been opened.

Watching the cobalt blue solid pigment in the box, which looks like a small hard candy, melting on the palette little by little.

Very decompressing.

After painting for a long time, these solid pigments, especially the white and yellowish light-colored paint columns, may not be decompressed after they are stained by the brush.

Therefore, every time Miss Mona finished painting, she had to take care of the various paint boxes and palettes very carefully and keep them spotless.

The dirty parts should be wetted with a small spray bottle like an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and then gently wiped off.

Literary rhetoric often uses "the sky is blue like a royal blue precious brocade."

Paint clouds.

There are 10,000 reasons why you can't completely show the original appearance of the sun on the canvas. In fact, the sun itself is not easy to paint.

Restricted by physical properties, the maximum contrast between light and dark that can be displayed is limited to a certain range.

Whether there is a color change is important.

Even the humidity of the air can be expressed by sophisticated painters using clouds and mist.

all in all.

Gu Weijing does not have this habit.

From early morning to dusk, the light changes all the time, all following the same principle - the sun is the only source of light.

He is certainly not sloppy if he is sloppy.

It doesn't matter whether the sun is hanging on your painting.

But in the world of art, the sky can never be smooth and flawless.

At least it can't be expensive silk.

As long as this is grasped, the sunlight will not make the audience feel unnatural.

A printer that sprays colors mechanically and evenly loses its natural agility and falls into inferior quality.

And paint the sky.

Canvas and watercolor paper are not LED displays capable of stimulating brightness exceeding 1200 nits.

This emphasizes that changes in light must be reflected in the work.

It’s definitely not like some careless and rough classmates who don’t wash the palette after using it. When I take watercolor class again after a week, I use my fingernail to pick off the solidified and agglomerated paint from the palette, rinse it and then rinse it. use.

While painting.

The precious silks and satins are dyed uniformly and evenly from head to toe. Instead, many impressionist masters would pursue the feeling of dyeing the sky in a messy way and making the sunlight fragmented.

You definitely need to draw the sky background first.

But there is no paranoia like girls who treat the maintenance of painting tools like the maintenance of beautiful dolls.

Excellent works can freeze time and nature.

It is difficult for a painter to depict the dazzling feeling of the sun on canvas.

Or simply switch to tube paint specifically for this purpose, which consumes faster.

In all works with a daytime theme, sunlight is everywhere.

There is almost no pure blue or pure white sky in oil paintings and watercolors. When Dulwich teachers taught the principles of painting, they repeatedly emphasized that one does not need to paint the sun, but one must have the sun in the painting.

Every piece of paint and palette must be tidy, fresh and lovely.

The existence of such simple principles actually reduces the difficulty of painting.

Next time you draw, just dip the tip of your pen into it and it's done.

The color of the sky is always centered on it.

Sunlight is generally expressed in a relatively simple way.

No matter how dirty the solid paint is, it will only stain the surface layer.

Gu Weijing also takes painting seriously.

From far away from the sun to close to the sun, from cold to warm colors.

It can be that the sun rises in the east and has not yet appeared above the sea, it can be that the sun has set in the west and has sunk below the mountain line, it can be a cloudy and rainy day, or it can be that a cloud just happens to cover the scorching sun...

Viewers should be able to tell at a casual glance at your work what time of day, season, and weather the scene was taken from.

Everyone prefers to be half-covered and half-covered, showing off the sun's rays through a layer of veil.

Then you need to draw the sunshine first.

He thought casually, and began to brush a large area of ​​the canvas with a large brush stained with paint.

The performance of moonlight is more complex and subtle than that of sunlight. Whether it is a bright and white moon, or a cold and melting moon, it needs to be carefully considered, and it is very delicate.

The night sky, without even moonlight and stars, is a more complex realm.

There are no fundamental principles.

If you are not good at painting and throw in a dead black screen, it can also be said to be the night.

However, excellent painters can also paint gradation changes under the influence of multiple complex light sources under limited dark light conditions.

For example, Van Gogh's "Open-air Café at Night" uses lights as the light source.

Another example is the female painter Carroll's "Old Church on a Thunderstorm Day", which is a very flowing and colorful thundercloud on a rainy night.

After advanced training in copying old churches.

Gu Weijing can now express the agility of the sky during the day with equal ease. In addition, he has learned from practicing watercolor for several days in a row——

“Let gravity work its magic.”

The secret to flat watercolor painting is always to let gravity and water do the work, not the artist.

Gu Weijing uses a large brush dipped in very thin and light paint for each stroke.

Act quickly and decisively.

In order to draw out long, broad brush strokes, he doesn't even mind letting the brush strokes go beyond the boundaries of the blank space fixed by the tape.

Professor Wattel often blatantly engages in professional discrimination in class, mocking oil painters as staid painters.

If you only look at flat coating.

In Gu Weijing's personal opinion, watercolor is more like a painter's than the Impressionist copying whose brushwork is detailed and intricate.

But sometimes, the principle of painting is so simple and crude.

Not so many fancy and complicated techniques.

One smooth move breaks all laws.

The naturally flowing paint colors you can draw out with a large brush stroke in one second are more vivid and colorful than those lines you think are delicate and drawn by using a small outline pen and spending twenty times the time. .

Bravely subtracting in techniques is another way to add luster to the picture effect.

The shooting time in the photo is closer to morning.

The sun is very low and the color changes in the sky are very intense.

When Gu Weijing composed the picture, he divided the colors of the sky into three main colors from top to bottom, from cold to warm.

The top layer is a dark cobalt blue.

By the middle two-thirds of the area, the color with the largest proportion becomes permanent rose red.

The closer you get to the sun below, the brighter the color will be.

The bottom layer of the painting.

The sunshine has turned into an Indian yellow that is more bright yellow... From the photo, it looks like the water vapor is heavier and the clouds are thicker and lower.

Therefore, Gu Weijing judged that it was not yet time to use more saturated lemon yellow.

The sfumato sky is just the lowest background of this painting.

If you feel it's not bright enough, after all the main scenery is painted, simply add a few strokes of lemon yellow as a modification in the sun area and the highlights of the clouds, and you're done.

Finish the canopy flatly. Gu Weijing opened the system panel and found that the watercolor experience value had changed to [Lv. 3 Semi-Professional (956/1000)].

Gu Weijing smiled and tilted his head.

On the one hand, it is because he is approaching the bottleneck period, and on the other hand, the flat painting method is too basic for him.

The experience value on the panel has only increased slightly.

"The experience value has been increased by 5 points, which is good."

His current state of mind is much better than when he was painting wisteria flowers before. He is calm and understands the painting process itself, which is more important than the increase in experience points on the panel.

He just glanced at it casually and turned off the panel.

After drinking a few sips of water, I pondered the next composition and brushwork in my mind, and then picked up a thick volume of Japanese watercolor master Terumi Suzuki's "Color Mixing Methods for Reaching the Ultimate in Watercolor" that Professor Vatel put on the table. 》Continue scrolling from the position where you last saw it.

Wait until the layer of sky paint is dry enough to paint on.

He cleaned the pen again and dipped it in paint.

Continue to outline the clouds on top of the base paint.

The general color tone of the clouds is generally the same as that of the background of the sky. The main difference is that with a layer of clouds and fog, the color becomes grayer and darker than the background.

Gu Weijing used cobalt blue and raw ocher to create a grayish color.

I swiped it twice on the palette and checked how it felt. It felt dark again, so I added a little more blue paint to refine the coldness of the color.

Compared to the sky.

This time, the color created by Gu Wei was thicker and oilier, with a lower water content.

The paint is sticky.

The brushwork is dry and crisp.

Still very clean, use one stroke to draw out the edges of the cloud folds.

When painting such a delicate border, you can use either a flat brush or a round brush with an artificial brush, each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Vattel actually recommends using a flat brush similar to an oil paint brush.

Round brushes are more delicate and obedient, but one disadvantage is that due to the brush configuration, round brushes are much more difficult to control the release of water than flat brushes.

Although this type of brush has the largest range of uses and can display the most delicate color effects, many painters and art students are afraid of it.

Gu Weijing uses a brush that is almost the same length, which is a boy's skill. The two methods of holding the brush and writing are slightly different.

But Gu Weijing still prefers to use a round-tipped pen.

On the difficulty of control.

No matter how good the water absorption performance of watercolor paper is, it is still not on the same level as raw rice paper, which has almost no water droplets flowing effect.

He used this as the bottom edge of the cloud, and began to use it as a boundary to blend upward.

Gu Weijing slowed down.

Smudging the clouds is a delicate task, and even with a semi-professional level of technique, there is still a certain feeling of sluggishness when painting.

This is a painting technique unique to watercolor, neither oil painting nor Chinese painting.

The latter two are applied with paint, only watercolor becomes flowing paint.

The brush in Gu Weijing's hand is now clean and has no color on it.

Only clear water.

In addition to flowing downward from high to low, watercolor paint can also flow upward.

It seems a bit counterintuitive.

The principle is that pigments will diffuse in water, so they can naturally flow and blend from areas with lower water content and drier to more humid areas before solidification.

Through this principle, we can skillfully draw the effect that the clouds at the bottom seen by the human eye are thickest and solid, and the clouds become softer and fluffier as they go up, becoming more like a thin layer of light mist.

He painted slowly one stroke at a time, feeling the paint spread on the tip of the brush.

Gu Weijing was not in a hurry.

The goal he set for himself today was not to increase his watercolor experience by a few points, but to ask himself to do his best to draw a cloud.

sand, sand, sand

……

Time passed by minute by minute.

In the quiet office, the only sounds that could be heard were the almost inaudible sound of brushes falling on watercolor paper, and the slight noise from the sports field coming from far away.

Gu Weijing's painting was not very good at the beginning. For some reason, the clouds he blurred out were a little restless.

It's not the energy-rich agitation of the flowing thunderstorm in "The Old Church on a Thunderstorm Day".

It's just that the picture is a bit dirty and messy.

The clouds were not as fluffy and natural as he had hoped.

Gradually, he slowly combined the brush in his hand with the theoretical knowledge he had mastered, and figured out some flavors.

"The muscle memory isn't right."

He is so used to painting oil paintings and Chinese paintings.

It is undeniable that this has helped him rapidly improve his watercolor skills in the past few days, and Gu Weijing has gained a lot.

But it also brings disadvantages.

He still followed some of the old muscular feelings and failed to fully bring out the unique strengths and properties of watercolor.

Gu Weijing's blending is still done by inserting the brush into the old lines and "scooping" the paint out with the brush, instead of letting the paint flow out naturally.

That's why he made the clouds very mottled.

The essence of the sfumato method is similar to that of flat painting, it is still the natural flow of paint.

His brushwork cannot be used as a way to apply color like an oil painting, but to build a channel that allows the colors to flow naturally along the water traces and moisture.

Regardless of the direction of the strokes, the paint moves from thick to light, from dry to areas with high moisture.

He wanted to manipulate the paint artificially so much that the effect of blending became very deliberate.

Not flat and fluffy enough.

“The art of painting is as good as your heart, just let nature take its course.”

Gu Weijing told himself in his heart.

He controlled the side edge of the pen tip and lightly applied water to the area where the dry paint was in contact, so as not to let the writing go too deep into the "bottom" of the clouds.

Just rub the edge of the brush and the edge of the paint lightly.

Paint slowly, one stroke after another.

The marks of each stroke press against the edge of the previous stroke, guiding the paint further and diluting it lighter.

[Watercolor experience value +7! 】

[Watercolor experience value +12! 】

[Watercolor experience value +9! 】

……

Gu Weijing felt the improvement of his technique, like paint dissolving in water, and the stagnant feeling at the pen tip also dissipated slightly.

He didn't specifically open the system panel to look at it.

Continue to draw clouds with peace of mind.

at last.

After he completed a few stratus clouds on the upper and middle sky, he began to concentrate on sketching the lowest, brightest, and closest clouds to the sun.

Gu Weijing heard a completely different notification sound from the system.

[Watercolor experience value +3! 】

[Congratulations, your watercolor level has been improved. 】

[Current watercolor level: Lv.4 professional painter·First level (1/5000)]

(End of this chapter)