Watercolour workshop with Paul Weaver

Techniques for painting landscapes
Our second, and final, day-long weekend workshop for Lacock Art Group members this year was given by professional artist, Paul Weaver, with a focus on teaching how to paint landscapes in watercolour. He delivered an incredibly informative session that everyone enjoyed and each of us went away having learnt something new.
Paul is a well-known artist whose primary inspirations are light and atmospheric effects and landscapes are among his favourite subjects. He runs art workshops at various locations including at the White Horse Bookshop in Marlborough, which are always popular. A visit to Paul's website to find out more about his work is highly recommended.
Workshop participants came with differing degrees of affection for and experience in watercolour; for some it’s their medium of choice, while several others usually work in acrylics, oils or pastels and hadn’t used watercolours for a long time. Nevertheless, everyone approached the workshop with an enthusiastic spirit and willingness to have a good go.
Paul’s first tip was to encourage us to adopt a ‘laboratory’ approach to watercolour painting. Try things out and experiment; don’t be frightened of putting paint on paper. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter, the important thing is that you learn by doing it. This resonated with several of us, including the author of this article who usually spends far too much time dithering before actually daring to apply paint!    

Start with a tonal value sketch
Paul explains that capturing light in a painting is the key to success, and to do this you need to assess the tonal contrast (or tonal values) of the scene. As well as using a reference photo he suggests taking notes about the light at the scene you’re painting, because a photo doesn’t convey colours correctly, especially when taken in bright sunlight.
He usually does a tonal sketch first, to make friends with the scene and tap into it. A tonal sketch can be abstract and doesn’t need to be perfect, he says; it’s an indication of the dark and light areas, and shadows. Scruffy is fine! First developing a tonal sketch is an approach often recommended by other artists and can help you decide whether or not a scene is going to work as a painting.
For the tonal sketch he roughly draws the outlines, distance, middle distance and foreground, to decide the design, then puts in tone and shadows. With complex paintings Paul says he spends more time on the design and drawing than on painting. 

Tonal sketch by Paul Weaver

Tonal sketch - values and contrast

Warming up
As a warm up exercise he showed us how to produce a one colour painting, which we then had a go at - a winter tree and field scene with shadows. Using a single colour, in this case burnt sienna, helps to focus on tone and contrast, instead of colour, which often preoccupies artists. 
​His advice is to connect with the subject first, before you paint. Do this by thinking about tone and the subject’s edges. This also informs the best type of paper to use: if the subject edges are sharp or jagged use dry paper, and if foggy and soft use wet paper. Avoid damp paper, which can cause cauliflowers! We used rough watercolour paper at the workshop.

One colour painting by Paul Weaver

Jane Tucker's one colour warm up

The fundamental concept of watercolours is of diluting the paint to make it lighter or darker, he says. Learn to paint by playing around to make the paint behave so that you know what it’s going to do – this removes the fear factor! 
Brush tips included using the point of the brush for straight lines, and the flat side for broken areas, called scufffing. The dry brush technique actually requires the brush to be quite wet with paint. 
Tone - work from background to foreground, and from light to dark. The sky is the lightest. He first wetted the whole sheet before painting the sky and distant part of the fields using a large round brush, size 20. It’s important to paint everything on the wash not in sections in one go, working quickly, so the paint blends together, coalescing softly rather than in stripy chunks. 
​Next he shows how to approach the middle-distance trees, using the side of the brush to achieve the effect of branches. To get light into the painting and the idea of sun coming through trees he lifts out paint in long, sweeping lines giving the impression of shafts of sunlight.

Key ingredients for a landscape painting
Next we learnt about the essential ingredients, or components, needed to form a landscape painting, such as techniques to approach skies, clouds, trees, water and so forth. To demonstrate, Paul paints a sky, with a large tree, river, reflections, and foreground.

• Wet the whole sheet. Paint sky over trees unless the trees are lighter than sky.
• Use only three colours. This makes you think about tone.
• For the sky, paint a little Light Red or Permanent Rose above the tree, and French Ultramarine at top and bottom. Aim for a graduated effect, avoid stripes. 
• Tree – has a rough edge so use a dry brush to paint it, in Raw Sienna with touch of Light Red. Darken with little Ultramarine Blue (mid-tone). For tree branches – the tree’s scaffolding – use 100% Ultramarine and Light Red.
  
• Next, Paul showed us how to paint skies with fluffy clouds. Draw the cloud shape with plain water and fill it in with water. Paint Cobalt Blue from the top of the paper down to the edge of cloud. Use pale Raw Sienna in mid of cloud, and add Red to Blue to make a light grey colour for the underside of the cloud.

Paul also taught us how to simplify perspective, to help make the prospect of it less daunting. Briefly, when drawing a building think of it as dealing with a box, a shoe box for example. Decide or observe where the horizon, or eye line, is in your design, he said, explaining the principles of one and two-point perspective.

Simplifying perspective

Bringing it all together 
Having produced our tonal pencil sketches, a one colour painting to warm up and learnt a number of techniques for painting various elements in a landscape, it was time to bring it all together in a resolved painting. We chose what we wanted to paint from a selection of photo print outs, some involved buildings set in a landscape, others of hills, fields, trees, and rivers.
Several reference photos were of different snow scenes so we asked Paul to show us how to paint snow. He demonstrated how to bring the elements together in a complete painting. Adding extra challenge for him, his reference photo was of a summer landscape scene, which called for expert improvisation to turn it into a winter snow scene!

Summer scene reference photo

Start with the sky

Snow is quite reflective of sky so take this into account when painting. As before, he starts with the sky, first wetting the paper. With a large brush, using strokes that slant downwards from the top right corner, he applies Raw Sienna to represent winter sunshine. Working quickly, he adds Alizarin Crimson, and then French Ultramarine. Alizarin stops the blue going green when it hits the yellow paint, he explains.
For the large trees in the distance he works from the outer edges of the branches towards the inner branches, using the side of a dry brush.
He mixes a grey made from Light Red, French Ultramarine and Raw Sienna for the trees and horizon line, strengthening it for definition on the building that helps to bring it forwards. 
To create the snow shadows he mixes French Ultramarine with Alizarin Crimson to make purple, painting loosely and freely.
He uses Viridian Green for the fir tree, he again uses a dry brush on its side and broken paint to let some sky peep through the branches. Mixing Viridian with Burnt Umber creates a dark green. He wets some of the branch edges to soften the appearance and blend it into the background.
The trunk of the fir tree he paints in a dark brown colour; a mix of French Ultramarine and Burnt Umber. He emphasises the importance of connecting the tree trunk with the shadow at the base of the tree, while paint is still wet, so that the trunk melts into the shadow and becomes one with the snow.
​For the path edges he uses Burnt Umber with any blue and paints on top of the shadow area.
The end result was a great painting!

Middle distance

Foreground

​It was our turn next to produce a complete painting, using the various techniques we had learnt earlier in the workshop, and with Paul there to give a guiding hand to each of us. To see how we got on, please take a look at the Paul Weaver workshop gallery page where you’ll find a range of photos from the day.

With special thanks to Karen Road and Jane Tucker for photography.