Acrylic Watercolor Painting Read online

  (7) For these various exercises, I’ve assumed that you’re going to work on scraps of old watercolor paper. But now try these effects on a variety of other surfaces. Try them on some scraps of old, smooth canvas or muslin. Try them on illustration board which has been coated with acrylic gesso; the gesso should be brushed on a bit roughly so that it retains the texture of the brush used to apply it. Experiment with drybrush on some absorbent Japanese paper; see how the paint sinks into the soft, fibrous texture, rather than riding on top of the ridges, as it does when you paint on the harder surfaced, less absorbent European paper.

  Bermuda Facade by Everett Raymond Kinstler, A.W.S., acrylic on canvas, 24”x24”. Smooth surfaced canvas— primed with acrylic gesso or left bare, never coated with an oil ground—is particularly receptive to scumbling. It’s something like working with pastel on textured paper, which softens and blends the stroke. This is especially evident in the soft brushwork of the sky. The building itself and the palms in the foreground are painted in fluid, slashing strokes, with wonderful spontaneity. For this kind of dashing brushwork, acrylic must be slightly thicker than transparent watercolor and somewhat more opaque.

  At the Fence by Arne Lindmark, A.W.S., acrylic and watercolor on watercolor paper, 22”x28”. The entire painting appears to be a mosaic pattern of small drybrush strokes. These small strokes, slightly squarish in character, are laid over one another in varying densities to produce roughly textured tones that range from pale to very dark. The drybrush strokes render the grass as effectively as the markings that punctuate the forms of the livestock.

  Here’s a money saving tip. I’ve said that an unsuccessful painting can be obliterated with acrylic gesso so you can try again. You can do this several times on each side of a good, thick sheet of paper. But I’ve warned you that the original texture of the paper eventually disappears and you might just as well be painting on Masonite once you’ve got several layers of gesso on each side of the sheet. At that stage you may not like the way this thick, multiple coat of gesso responds to washes of liquid color. But such a sheet might be perfect for a painting that contains a fair amount of drybrush. If you’ve applied the gesso as I recommended in Chapter 3—with each coat brushed at right angles to the preceding coat—you’ll have a canvas-like texture on which drybrush can be very appealing.

  Scumbling

  Scumbling is a word which is widely misused. It has two interlocking meanings and I’ll try to explain them both before I go any further.

  One way to scumble is to pick up a dab of fairly thick paint on the tip of your brush, and apply it with a kind of scrubbing motion, moving the brush quickly back and forth. In this way, you blur the paint over the surface, very much as you’d blur or blend a stroke of pastel with your thumb. The paint takes on a rough, broken quality, rather than the smooth, flowing quality of paint applied with the kind of slow, steady, rhythmic strokes you use to apply a fluid wash.

  Scumbling also means applying a layer of fairly light, semi-transparent or semi-opaque color over a darker underlayer. In this case, the scumbled paint can be fairly thick—as I described a moment ago—or it can be rather fluid and washy. The important point is that the scumble doesn’t quite cover the paint underneath, which shines through. In other words, the scumble and the underlying color blend in the eye of the viewer to form a third tone. Thus, you could paint a solid blue sky, and then scumble in some white clouds which turn bluish white where the sky shines through the scumble.

  Impossible in traditional watercolor painting, light-over-dark drybrush effects are easy with acrylic. A scrap of cold pressed watercolor paper was first coated with a dark wash. A medium sized flat sable brush was then dipped into a mixture of opaque tube color, acrylic medium, and water. The brush was then drawn downward over the paper in a series of vertical strokes; with each stroke the brush deposited less color and revealed more of the underlying paper.

  Acrylic color mixed with acrylic medium will bold the precise character of the brushstroke in a way that rarely happens with traditional watercolor. This scumbled passage demonstrates the remarkable vitality of acrylic when applied with a rough, scrubbing motion. The brush is moved quickly back and forth, as you would in oil painting, rather than in a slow, rhythmic motion, as you would when you’re applying a flat wash. Yet the color remains just as transparent as traditional watercolor.

  This scumbled passage consists of semi-transparent and semi-opaque color applied on a dark underwash. The brush was dipped in slightly thickened color, blended with acrylic medium rather than water, and scrubbed over the paper with a quick back and forth motion. Where the color piles up more heavily, the tone is semi-opaque; at other points, the scumbled strokes form a thin veil of semi-transparent color. Throughout the passage, the underlying dark tone shines through. In traditional watercolor this would be impossible, because the scrubbing motion of the brush would dislodge the underlying wash and the two colors would combine, each losing its individuality. Here the colors interact, rather than blend.

  Actually, these two definitions of scumbling do have one important point in common. Whether you apply thick paint with a scrubbing motion or apply more fluid paint light over dark, you’re still working with color that partially hides, partially reveals the color underneath. Either way, you have a chance to achieve some extraordinarily rich color effects. Because wet acrylic paint won’t disturb the dry acrylic paint underneath, you can scumble one color over another to your heart’s content without producing mud. On the contrary, you can build one color on top of another in a way that’s impossible even with oil paint—which dries so slowly that you’ve got to wait for days before you can paint a second coat.

  What are some of the ways in which you can use scumbling to enrich your paintings? I’ve already said you can scumble clouds of one color into a sky of another color. In the same way, you can scumble the foam on waves. In an autumn landscape where you get a dozen different shades of orange, yellow, and brown, you can scumble one warm tone over another to achieve a richness of broken color which is impossible any other way. Scumbling with thick color is a way of getting a much rougher graded wash, in contrast with the smoothly graded wash you get with more fluid color. Try combining scumbling with drybrush when you paint rough textures like the rocks and weathered wood I mentioned earlier. The list could go on and on ...

  Acrylic mediums are particularly valuable in scumbling. In general, scumbling requires thicker paint than a simple mixture of tube color and water. You’re likely to want the creamy consistency of tube color thinned with matt or gloss medium, or the really heavy consistency of tube color blended with gel.

  Broken Color

  Just a moment ago I used the words broken color. This may be an unfamiliar term, so let me explain. Solid color, of course, is a continuous layer that completely covers any color that may be underneath. Solid color can be opaque, which means that no hint of an underlying color comes through; or it can be transparent, like a layer of colored glass, completely covering—but not concealing—the color underneath. The point about solid color, whether it’s opaque or transparent, is that it’s continuous, with no breaks.

  Broken color, on the contrary, is discontinuous, full of breaks and spaces and gaps that allow the underlying color to come through full strength. If you drybrush one color over another, you get broken color. That is, as your brush skims over the peaks of the paper, lots of paper is left untouched, and the underlying color comes through in the gaps. Scumbling can also give you broken color. If you apply thick color with a scrubbing motion, and scrub with a kind of calculated carelessness, you’ll again leave lots of little gaps for underlying color to break through. The result can be a kind of tapestry in which many threads of different colors interlock with one another to produce a depth and complexity that’s unique to acrylic.

  To get the full impact of broken color, try a series of steps something like the following.

  (1) Cover a small rectangle of paper with a layer of solid color, either
transparent or opaque.

  (2) Drybrush a second color over the first, being sure to allow lots of the underlying color to shine through.

  (3) Scumble a thick third color over the preceding two colors—making sure that they’re both dry before you begin—using a free, scrubbing motion that doesn’t cover the paper completely. Once again, make sure that the underlying colors break through here and there.

  (4) Now brush a unifying wash of transparent color over the preceding three layers. You can stop at this point if you like. But you could actually keep repeating and elaborating these steps, in different orders and combinations, for as long as you please.

  Let’s look, for a moment, at how this broken color sequence might be applied to a specific subject. Think again about that mass of autumn foliage. You could probably begin by painting the entire mass of trees in a dark, solid brown. Over this underpainting, scumble various shades of semi-opaque orange, yellow, red, violet, and smoky gray for a touch of coolness. To suggest the texture of leaves, trunks, and twigs, you might then resort to touches of drybrush: bright flecks for the leaves, darker tones for the bark. A few touches of blue-gray drybrush might be right to suggest breaks in the mass of foliage where the sky shines through. And to unify this complex mass of broken color, perhaps you’ll want to brush on a clear wash of yellow or orange to bring all the tones together—and to restore transparency to all that semi-opaque brushwork.

  Opaque Color

  Some colors are naturally opaque; that is, if you paint them on straight from the tube and brush them on in a solid layer, they’ll cover up what’s underneath. Among the naturally opaque colors are white, of course, the cadmiums, Naples yellow, and the various iron oxide reds. Other colors are naturally transparent; even when applied straight from the tube, you can see through them to what’s underneath. Most of the blues (except for cerulean) are fairly transparent; so are most of the greens (except for chrome oxide green opaque), the crimsons, the umbers, and the siennas.

  You can make a transparent color opaque by adding white or some other opaque color. Conversely, you can make an opaque color transparent by thinning it out with water or by blending it with acrylic medium. An opaque color also becomes more transparent if you scrub the paint on thinly with a scumbling motion. And if you apply a transparent color thickly enough, it does tend to cover up what’s underneath; but thickly applied transparent color tends to look murky and blackish, losing its vitality.

  A painting executed in opaque water based paint—which can be traditional watercolor mixed with opaque white, casein, designer’s colors, poster color, or acrylic—is called by the French word gouache. The technique of painting in gouache (or opaque watercolor, as we call it in the United States) is really quite a separate subject, and needs a book in itself.

  Although opaque color can be useful in acrylic watercolor painting—as you’ve seen throughout these chapters—I think its place is in combination with transparent, semi-transparent, and semi-opaque color. To use acrylic simply for solid tones of opaque color is really throwing away the greatest advantage of the medium: the ability to produce passages that range from complete opacity to glassy transparency, with every conceivable gradation in between.

  I’ve already pointed out how to use thick, opaque color in scumbling—which converts it to semi-opaque color—for accents like a break of light through the trees, and for veils of semi-opaque tone that can subdue or modify another color. Beyond this, I think the single greatest value of opaque color is in a technique derived from the old masters of oil painting: a watercolor version of underpainting and glazing.

  Morning in the Woods by Stephen Potasky, acrylic on 140 lb. watercolor paper, 20”x24”. The artist began by soaking the paper in water for ten minutes, then stretched and stapled it to a plywood board. “After the paper was dry,” he explains, “a fast sketch was made. The paper was again wet with a 3” brush, and large tones were worked, leaving areas of white. With smaller brushes, details were added until the paper was dry. Then, to bring out the white areas, the paper was rubbed with steel wool and zircon sand. The painting was reworked with ... tints to give it the ‘fresh’ watercolor effect. ” The completed painting was mounted on a sheet of Masonite and sprayed with matt varnish through a mouth atomizer. Although dried acrylic is generally difficult to remove, industrial abrasives can be used to lighten selected areas or erase them altogether. This technique can be especially useful to introduce luminosity by scraping down to the bare paper. (Photo courtesy M. Grumbacher, Inc.)

  Ragged Robin by John W. McCoy, A.W.S., acrylic, oil, and watercolor on watercolor paper, 22¼“×30¼”. This unusual mixed media painting exploits the obvious fact that oil and water won’t mix. The granular texture is a controlled accident that occurs where the aqueous and oil media meet and part company. Marble textured Victorian decorative papers are produced by a somewhat similar method and combinations of acrylic and oil washes are worth trying for other kinds of accidental textures. (Courtesy Coe Kerr Gallery, Inc.)

  (1) A flat, solid area of opaque color can be an excellent first step before you go on to transparent or semi-transparent overwashes. A sunrise or a sunset, for example, may look a lot richer when the transparent colors of the clouds and the sun’s rays are painted over a solid foundation of dusty yellow or even over a contrasting cool tone. A mass of green trees might gain in depth and subtlety if the transparent greens were applied over an underpainting of opaque brown.

  You could, of course, underpaint the sky or the trees in transparent color. But the opaque underpainting lends a sense of weight and solidity that’s radically different from a transparent undertone.

  (2) The opaque underpainting doesn’t have to be a simple flat tone. Modeling light and shadow can be a great deal easier when you work with thick, opaque color. Among other things, you can paint out a mistake and start over. Suppose, for example, that you want to render the complex geometric shapes of a cathedral or some other difficult piece of architecture. A simple solution might be to mix up two or three flat tones to paint the lights, halftones, and shadows. Having rendered this in opaque color—perhaps only in shades of black, white, and gray—and having made all the necessary corrections by painting out and repainting, you can then work freely over this opaque underpainting in washes of luminous, transparent color. You’ll still get a transparent watercolor, but with the solidity and precision you need for a difficult subject.

  This, by the way, is the way the old masters painted portraits. The face and hands are always the hardest part of a portrait, and the old masters generally preferred to paint these in shades of gray or brown, solving the problems of modeling three dimensional forms before they had to worry about color. When the forms were fully realized in monochrome, and this underpainting was dry, they could then go back into the picture with rich, transparent color that allowed the underlying forms to shine through.

  (3) An opaque underpainting can lend not only color and three dimensional form, but texture. Your flat color or your modeling can be done in really thick paint—perhaps further thickened with gel—which will hold the lively texture of your brushstrokes. Then, when your washes of liquid color go over the dried underpainting, the fluid paint will settle into this irregular texture, which strikes through and enlivens the overpainting.

  Let’s go back to rocks and trees again. The bark on the tree trunk can be underpainted with rough strokes of thick color that really look and feel like bark. And if your strokes of thick color follow the direction of the slabs of rock, they’ll create a rocky texture which is accentuated by the overpainting.

  This rough underpainting not only enlivens overwashes of transparent color, but creates a marvelous surface for drybrush and scumbling. If the thick underpainting has peaks and valleys of dry paint, your drybrush strokes will leave lively flecks and scrubs of color on a textured surface which you’ve prepared yourself—a custom-made surface —for a specific purpose, carefully planned in advance to suit the subject.

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4) I said earlier that you can paint out an unsuccessful passage with opaque color and start over. I should emphasize that this opaque color needn’t be white, but can be any color, preferably some color that complements or reinforces the colors that will go over it when you try again.

  When you underpaint in opaque color, don’t just stick to obvious color combinations. Yellow or brown may be the right underpainting for green trees, but some contrasting color like red or orange or violet may do surprising things to an overwash of green. A delicate yellow underpainting—not cadmium yellow, but yellow ochre—can lend an unexpected glow to a blue sky. I’ve seen orange brickwork underpainted with green, brown rocks underpainted in blue, beige sand underpainted in violet, and still more surprising uses of contrasting colors. Try out what looks like the “wrong” color a few times and see what happens. You may be in for some wonderful surprises. Remember, if it turns out to be a mistake, you can always paint the whole thing out with some other opaque color and try again.