Watercolour landscape painting - creating distance

1. Introduction : Hello and welcome to this Skillshare course. I'm Kelly and I weren't here in my home studio on the family farm in Cambria, which is in the northwest of England. In this course, which is proximal suited towards intermediate, we're going to be looking at distance. R chose distance because I know a lot of you do you enjoy doing landscapes. For those of you that a dose of them are clauses in the past. This is a nice one to progress onto once you've done those, if you're a complete beginner, I might recommend that you do some of those other courses before you move on to this one. With distance, we'll be talking a lot about saturation and tone and color. Those are all things you need to look out to get that into your landscape. Because of course, we're actually put trying to achieve a 3D image on what is a 2D surface, either your paper or your Canvas. That's a 2D surface. And we're trying to achieve a more 3D image. That's where the tricky part comes in, which is something that we all struggle with. I'll go ahead now. We're just going to break this down into a few little snippets of what we should really be looking at to get achieved that distance in your paintings. And then I'll have an exercise for you at the end. 2. Colour : For the purposes of today, I'm going to use this photograph which I'll pop up here also. This has got a lot of distance in it. This was stored on the top of steel felt looking across MEA. So we've got several miles. I'm not sure how many miles, but a lot of miles before you get to the next hills there, you've got a lot of distance in this. I'll choose some more photos and put those in the reference section for you that you can have a look at and perhaps have a go at painting as well. But this is just the one I chose because of the colors in it really under saturation. To begin with, we'll talk about color. Now. Some colors tend to recede, they look further away and some colors tend to jump forward. Addict do another class just on color. So if you want to have a look at that, you can do as well. But in general, your blues and your cooler colors tend to look further away even if they're not. And you'll notice this with your garden flowers and things like that. If you go out into the garden and you've got a blue flower at the end of your garden, it will look further away than a yellow flower. If you pop a blue flower and a yellow flower together, the yellow one, it's going to come forward. So save your warmer colors, your yellows and your oranges for the foreground, and you blues for the background. Now, I would recommend with your colors that you try and keep a similar palette throughout a lot of my paintings, actually some of these behind her, a bit monochrome, but a lot of my paintings, although they look quite vibrant and they look like they've got a lot of color in them. I actually only use four or five colors, and that includes things like white as well. So the actual primaries, I'm probably just using three or four to mix all the different grays, greens, and browns that you have in a landscape. If you use those same colors throughout the painting, but just use them in different combinations that can really help with your distance when you start. And we all paid differently as well. This is the thing. I always start with the sky and then I'll do the distant hills and then I'll work my way forward. Because you're working your way forward into more detail, into stronger colors, which works well with watercolor. When you start with your distant colors, you might make a gray, but you'll put more blue in it. You'll have your blue, yellow, and red to make your gray. But as you can forward, you will use the same colors, but you will adjust the amounts that you've got less blue or more yellow and that will naturally bring them forward. So you don't need to have loads and loads of colors in your palette. So you just need to adjust the levels of those grays and those greens. And with your greens, with lot, if you're doing something that's got lots of lush fields in it and you've got a lot of green in the painting for the distant ones have more blue in that green mix. And then as you come forward, add some yellow and that's going to bring that forward. So color is a very useful tool to achieve distance very easily once you know the rules. And regarding your blues and yellows, greens, this is just a little side note Roo, but with green sometimes it can look a little bit artificial, especially if you use them straight out of the tin. Think about what's on the opposite side of the color wheel to green and that's red. And if you just add a tiny touch of red to you agree, it can actually make it look a bit more natural. I hope I'm not going too quickly through that. I hope that makes sense. But really distance, you need blue in the distance to take the eye further away. And then the coolers that jump forward yellows. You really want to avoid having those in too far in the distance. Let's save those for the foreground if you can. There are always exceptions to the rule. You may be out. Notice that there's perhaps especially this applies in summer quite a lot. There might be a recently cooked field that has got very short grass and the sunshine and just on that and then there's clouds near to you. It might be that that field is really shining out. If that's what you're seeing and that's what you want to portray in your painting, then do that, make that nice and bright because that's what the sun's hitting and it's lighting it up. So there's always, always gonna be exceptions to the rule with any painting. And of course, you need to break the rules to make the artwork your own as well. 3. Saturation : Very often when you look into the distance and you look at the far distance, you'll see that the colors are much less saturated than they are in the foreground. Next time you're out and about if you're out in the car or perhaps you're on a trend journey, you've got time to look out of the window, just take a look at the landscape. Or it might be a cityscape even and see how in the first distance, the saturation of those colors is much less than it is in the foreground. This in watercolor is very easy to achieve because you just add in that extra water to make the colors less saturated. Now, don't forget that all your watercolor paints will be different. Everybody doing this course and myself, and we've all got different types of watercolors. We've got different brands. Some of those might have student quality watercolors. Some of us might you use tubes? Some of us may be using professional watercolors. Now the difference with your watercolors is the amount of pigment and the type of binders that the user in them. So with the professional, more expensive watercolors, you will have a lot more pigment to the amount of binder. And when I say binder, that's just that whatever they use to bind those pigments together before you up the water to them. So I use senility or paints quite often, and they've actually use honey as a binder, which sort of gives a bit of a vibrancy. Some of the student quality ones, you may recall the ones that we had as children and with a little round disc, they use things like chalk as a binder and that can actually make them quite a mushy white color as well. So the quality of your watercolors depends on what we're using as a binder and how much pigment that they have in them. If we think of a popular brand here in the UK is Winsor and Newton. You've got Winsor and Newton professional and the Winsor and Newton's student. There's nothing different in the actual color. The colors are exactly the same. It's just in the student walls. There isn't as much of that color. Which is why the less expensive, because it's the actual pigment color that's the most expensive. So the reason I'm telling you about all this difference in the watercolors is because you will have to adjust that. If, when I'm using my professional watercolors and you're perhaps using student once, you'll need to be aware that you'll need more pigment than I'm using. So in the long run, it's just as economical to use the professional ones because you're using half as much. So with that in mind, when you want to get that distance, you need to add more water to your background colors so that they're less saturated. And then again, increase that less water as you get more pigment as you come further forward in the painting. One thing that you really, really need to remember with that is that when you are painting, the cause that you're putting on will dry up about 50% lighter. This is with what your watercolors. All the same rules apply if you're working with oil or acrylic or anything else regarding your color and your saturation. But you're achieving it a different way with the watercolors because they dried much lighter than you put them on it. You need to be thinking about that as you're putting them on. If it's exactly the right color for your eye when you're putting them on, that's going to be the wrong color when it's dried. You need to have them slightly more vibrant than you actually want. 50% more, really. That's the thing that comes with practice. And it's something a lot of beginners do. And you'll find you've got very, very pale looking washes. Once they've dried. If you work in wet-on-dry, you can always increase that if you like. You can always alter the colors by putting another layer over the top. 4. Weather: When you're observing the colors and the saturation in the landscape. Also think about the weather and the atmosphere and what effect that's having on the landscape. You'll often notice in summer that things look further away when it's a very hazy, hot day and there's absolutely no chance of rain. Things look very much further away by getting this right. When somebody's looking at your painting at a later date, they'll be able to tell perhaps what time of year you did it. So that's another thing to keep in mind. Obviously when it's actually raining and when it's cloudy, that's going to affect your distance as well. And clouds are a good thing to get distancing because you can use them in a prospective way as well because the Clouds nearest to you are gonna be it bigger. And then you do some smaller clouds, usually on the horizon a bit further down. That iconic move further away because of the size. Size wasn't something I was gonna talk about today. What we were just talking really about the colors and the saturations and the tones of things. Because perspective is the home of the course really. But really do think about that as well about scale. This is something I've talked about in previous courses. Things near a tubing, much larger than things further away being much smaller. So add that into painting as you go along. But this was just a little snippet to say, do bear in mind the weather and do look at the effect that it has on the colors that you're looking at in your landscape. 5. Exercise: With everything that we've just talked about in mind, you need to go ahead now and do your exercise. For this exercise, you'll need a photograph of a landscape with plenty of distance in it. You can either use the ones that I've provided this one included or you can choose one of your own. Then you need to take the photograph and put it in half or cut it where there's lots of distance and where you've got those colors. In this one here, the foreground is right at the edge. So you want at the edge there to be some distance, if that makes sense. So of course, your photograph and tape it with some masking tape to a piece of watercolor paper. This can be a practice paper. I'm using SAA practice paper. Once that's taped down, you need to get your colors out and practice making those colors. Practice, practice matching them. Getting the right amount of saturation. So increasing and decreasing the amount of water that you use, using more pigment. And again, like I said earlier, adjusting those colors as you go along. And I would likely for this to try and stick to just three or four primaries. You won't need white, of course, because you've got the white of the paper. When I'm working, I tend to use a couple of blues. I only vary. Usually use just one red and sometimes I use two yellows. That really is a personal thing. When you're doing landscapes, you might want to stick to them on natural colors of the earthy colors. I quite like using them a little bit more vibrant, but that's very much a personal thing. But I would say two blues, one red, and one or two yellows at the most. Spend plenty of time getting those. Just write and having a look and see if they match the photograph. Once you've done that, you can go ahead and stick your photograph back together. Actually, I haven't thought about that and do a finished piece. And then if you would like to upload those for everyone else to take a look at that will be lovely. In our previous courses, we concentrated on income wash and we've done a lot of drawing with our pencil. Those of you who enjoy doing that, go ahead and do a drawing first as well, if you'd like to. You can just do a painting in watercolor, but either way it's entirely up to you. 6. Conclusion : I hope you've found that costs useful and that you can now get a little bit more distance into your paintings. And I very much look forward to seeing them when you upload them. As always with these courses, please do ask if you've got anymore questions, anything that I've skimmed over all that you would like to know a little bit more detail on. Please do get in touch. You can get in touch with me here on Skillshare, or you can talk to me or Messenger on Instagram, which I will put up here somewhere. You can always contact me through Instagram because that's the social media are used the most or you can contact me here on Skillshare. And I will always do my best to get back to you as soon as I can with any questions that you might have. And I will always try and get back to you with some feedback on your uploaded work as well. I always tried to do that within a couple of days where possible. Thank you very much for joining me on this course and I hope you enjoy your painting and drawing. Bye Bye for now.