Ferny Grove Demo at the CWA show

This last Wednesday, I did a demo at the Firehouse Gallery, for the CWA show. We had a great turnout!! :) Over 40 folks came, and we chatted and painted together. Good fun!

I used Saunders Waterford 140 lb Rough— my current favorite paper. I had a Rekab mop, a few Escoda Perla rounds, my lovely reservoir liner (from the Castagnet workshop 5 years ago, though you can get it from a variety of vendors) and some chinese calligraphy brushes (which I’ll be going over in a different post).

The subject of the demo was “Simplifying Your Shapes”, so I chose a fun, messy subject matter that needed some cleaning up, and that had some issues for us to solve. I started things off by sharing the reference photo I took, and doing a notan from it. Here’s the photo-

This first thing I’m always cautious about when I’m working plein air is the experience of being pleasantly overwhelmed by my senses— a wonderful, beautiful space doesn’t necessarily make for a great painting. Doing a black and white notan can be really helpful with this. It helps you figure out what you have to remove, and just as importantly, what you sometimes need to add. When one starts to build a notan from this photo, two things become clear—

1) the value of the tree trunk in the foreground is not separated enough from the dark midground, and

2) the ferns don’t have a strong enough value behind all of their form, to make them pop

These are the two problems the notan has to help me solve.

So, I started at it, left to right, building my forms. Here you can see my notan, with the two red arrows showing the big changes I made.

Change #1 is that I need some light on the trunk, to help it separate from the background. It’s simple and subtle, but actually a big deal. It makes the tree trunk appear and drops it more firmly into the foreground, but it also stops the eye and creates a stronger circular movement in the painting that wasn’t there in the photo.

Change #2 drops a few trees into the midground, behind the ferns. This makes the ferns the clear focal point of the painting— the contrast is strong enough now for the ferns to pop, instead of “dissolving” into the background.

From here, we began painting. I did a very quick, light sketch on the papaer— mostly indicating the location of important things, like the tree trunk in the foreground, the tops of the ferns, the horizon line in the midground where all the trunks meet the ground. The first wash is easy. Play time. I wet the back of the paper to hydrate it and extend the Watercolor Clock, dropped in a warm pale green for the sunny background, and brang it down into a brighter, more vibrant green where the ferns are. At this stage I can almost do whatever I want, splattering, dancing, spitting. I didn’t actually do a jig, but I did splatter and spit little bits of spittle on the painting to create visual texture. ;) When I was done, I let it dry for a bit during a break, using a blow dryer too.

Then comes the harder part, the darks. But the good news is we planned out the shape of this stage when we did the notan. That helps. They’re almost the same shape—

Working left to right, I began to drop in the darks, dividing space up, adding little trunks and branches and bits as I saw fit. The drawing was very loose, and a lot of these details I didn’t put down with the pencil. As I was taught, and as I like to say, “Paint with your brush, not your pencil.”

The other thing I brought up at the demo is how the shapes in this subject are connected. They move from positive shapes up top (the dark trees) to negative shapes down below (the backlit ferns are entirely painted negatively— the green is from the first wash). This can be very interesting visually. The background trees are different objects from the ferns, but they’re not necessarily different separate shapes in the painting. They’re connected now. Here is a piece of the notan, drawn out in red, to show you the weird interesting shape the two “objects” create when connected—

Whichever way we turn it doesn’t matter. The two objects bonded together are more compelling, with more sophisticated edges, than they are separate. The bonded shapes also help us transition visually from “object” to “object”, moving around the image with greater ease, instead of being trapped in a certain area.

And that was mostly it for the demo. I would normally add in some details and such— additional greens dropped in thickly and opaquely, a bit of darks here and there, etc.— but there wasn’t any more time left. Thanks to the CWA for providing the opportunity to paint and share. Here’s the final image again—