Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium Read Online Free PDF Page A

andgeneral-to-specific progression. By not committing to brushwork that is difficult to change cleanly, we keep our range of choices as open as possible.
    With regard to their impact on the painting, there is a hierarchy of the marks you might make. Washes are more general than strokes. Soft edges are less specific than hard ones. Light is easier to cover than dark. Colors that are already present in the painting will be less obtrusive than new ones. You can always add another stroke a week later, if you decide it’s called for, but you can’t always take one away.

    U SING THE L ANGUAGE OF F ORM
    One way to keep from getting specific too quickly is to stay abstract as long as possible. For me, this is mainly a matter of how I think about the subject. During the inner dialog that accompanies the painting process, I can describe the image by naming everything in terms of the content, or I can stick to the language of form.
    For example, here is a content-based, narrative description of the photo below: This is a street scene in Mexico, late in the day. One side of the street is in sunlight, the other in shadow. A woman carrying shopping bags is crossing the street, while another is standing on the sidewalk. Several cars, some parked, some moving, are in the middle distance. A big tree shows above the sunlit buildings. A mountain in the distance stands out against the clear blue sky.
    Here is the same scene described in the language of pure form: The right quarter and the bottom third of the page are rectangles of cool, dark neutral. A triangle comprising warm, very light, rectilinear forms begins at the center of the page and widens toward the left. A pattern of dark verticals is distributed across the triangle. Above it a semicircle of intense medium dark green is silhouetted against a middle-value blue, which fills the entire top left quadrant. Where the triangle and the dark strips converge, a mid-value purple-gray form widens upward, one third of the way into the blue.
    How I choose to think about the picture can have a profound effect on the way I begin to paint it. In the early stages of a painting I usually want to establish the general structure of the image, without getting caught up in specificity. The painting has to work first of all as an arrangement of big shapes, and at this level it is more important for the pattern of darks and lights to be strong than for any specific information about content to be present. This is why it is important to ask: How long can I stay abstract?
    Until I have taken care of the fundamental needs of the painting, I don’t have sufficient basis for deciding how much information to include. It is easy to get involved in the proportions of the woman crossing the street, for example, and lose track of the fact that she is primarily part of a big shadow. If I were actually standing in the scene, I would be aware of the figures, but I would probably not be studying them in any detail. In the painting, I want the elements of the picture to have an emotional presence similar to the actual experience, which is not necessarily the same thing as seeing them in a photograph.
    Photos exert a powerful influence. It is easy to assume that the painting will feel right only if I duplicate the photo exactly, especially if I am already thinking of the elements of the picture as people, buildings, cars, and trees. When I am thinking in terms of big, abstract shapes, however, there are no people, no sidewalks, no shopping bags—just a few somewhat darker and lighter strokes within the big shadow. This leaves me free to decide what role I want each part to play.
    Opposite is a painting of the scene done from this point of view. The individual components (people, buildings, cars, and trees) are minimally described and, out of context, might be difficult to recognize, but all together add up to a “realistic” interpretation. A content-based approach would have invited all the associations that attend