Demonstration
Cascade above the Ogwen Falls
For this demonstration I chose Two Rivers blue-grey paper with a lovely NOT surface, as I wanted to make this a particularly moody work. Tinted papers make excellent surfaces for vignettes, as artists perhaps don’t feel quite as concerned about leaving large unpainted areas as they might with white watercolour paper. The colours I used were Daniel Smith Fine watercolour.
Step 1
1 I began with Naples yellow over the central sky with a few touches of white gouache, followed by a weak mix of Indian red and phthalo blue (red shade) over the rest of the sky, with some alizarin crimson in the lower part. With tinted papers, the highlights are best rendered with white gouache, which I often mix with Naples yellow, as this is an opaque watercolour.
2 Before completing this stage, I brushed in a stronger mixture of Indian red and phthalo blue wet in wet for the darker clouds.
Step 2
I painted the main rocky area with Indian red and phthalo blue then dropped touches of yellow ochre in, varying this in places with Naples yellow, especially on the right-hand side.
Step 3
1 The trees above the cascade were painted with a mix of phthalo blue and serpentine green, and the rock structures with phthalo blue and cadmium red, again dropping in yellow ochre.
2 For the flattish rock below the foreground trees I used a weak mix of French ultramarine and cadmium red, giving a slightly warmer grey, and again tinting it with yellow ochre here and there. 3 To achieve the effect on the lefthand rocks I resorted to hematite violet genuine, which creates the blob-like wash, suggesting mottled and pitted rock.
4 A mix of French ultramarine and burnt umber was then applied with a No. 1 Rigger to create the fracture lines and two of the right-hand trees then the same mix and a No. 6 Round created the dark pool.
Step 4
1 The conifers were painted with a mixture of serpentine green and burnt umber, and their trunks with burnt umber and French ultramarine. I cut the bottom of the trunks off sharply. This approach was planned before I started the painting and, although I did not carry out a studio sketch in advance to work out the positions of the main features, such a sketch is always important unless you are absolutely sure about the composition.
2 I then painted the cascading water with white gouache and, using the same colour, reinforced the light in the sky and added touches of highlight to cloud edges.
Step 5
1 Painting watercolour over gouache can produce ugly colour seepage where you may want a hard edge, but here I applied phthalo blue into the shadow areas of the cascading water, softening it into the white gouache.
2 I lightened some of the rocks where they caught the light with a mixture of Naples yellow and white gouache, while in places cadmium orange was used to liven up the colour. I also reshaped the right-hand rock.
3 Bringing down tree trunks in this way as a kind of frame and lopping them off before the edge of the work can be an effective way to create the vignette. I stopped the rocks and falling water well short of the bottom, and this suggests a more spontaneous result.
The other three sides reach right out to the edge of the composition as is more usual.