Watercolors… In learning to choose clarity begin with what you think. We know our world by observation and thoughts. Our thoughts are either clear or hazy, confused or enlightened. What we observe leads to a vast assortment of thoughts. Thinking is much like watercolor painting.
When I think of clarity it brings me back to my first watercolor class, and the color wheel. I learned everything about art and life from those classes. We started with looking at subjects then drawing what we see. We used pencil sketches, then drawing skills, onto what makes a form i.e. shadows, highlights and median light. We finally were allowed to play with color by making our own color wheel. Until that class I’d never made a color wheel from scratch – those were always printed and paint tubes were already mixed. That class opened my eyes to many things.
I learned all colors originate from the primary red, yellow and blue hues. Primary colors are the purest form, as they stand alone, not produced from other colors. Mixing colors breaks the pure primaries down but also gives new range of tints and hues. Orange, green and violet come next. Then to the tertiary level blends into Yellow orange, Red orange, yellow green, blue green, red violet, blue violet.
Watercolors are known for their luminous glow, soft blends and often-brilliant hues. When mixing watercolors, one jar of clear water is used in the mixing and another jar is used for rinsing brushes. Contaminating the clear water with unclean brushes makes for impure color thus muddy paint. Muddy colors create flat, dull and lackluster paintings, not likely to gain viewer attention and best left for the trash heap.
Luminosity in watercolor painting is the aspiration for all artists in every work. That means the colors you paint with are pure and mixed properly. Luminosity comes from the shine of the white paper glowing beneath the applied paint. It can also mean that paper doesn’t show but the color is pure and richly shines on it’s own. Losing transparency defeats the purpose of purity and kills the glow. There is a point in each work that defines the time to stop work and finish. Many of my paintings have passed that point and ended up trash. Well, I did paint on the other side to save on paper!
Watercolor is one of the most difficult mediums to master. I faced my doubts and fears about being artist by learning to paint. It took me many years and hours of practice to create watercolors worth keeping. Now I’m an artist who loves to paint with watercolor. I’m challenged in new works to keep things pure, luminous within my own style and from what I see, not only in art but in life as well.
You see, the process of training, method of painting and disciplined practice gave me solid basis to become a fine artist. It built my confidence and chased away the doubts that plagued my mind about my skills and talent. It always seemed I never measured up to other peoples level and certainly not the history of masters over the centuries. My teacher explained to me that talent wasn’t the only thing making a person an artist. The best artists were self- motivated taught and trained. Talent without training often led to nowhere.
This process showed me a standard of measure and wonderful springboard into clear thinking. more on that later.
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