Better design
Paul Talbot-Greaves’ new series unlocks the secrets behind creating better paintings. This month he discusses the importance of good design as he demonstrates how to plan a watercolour landscape
Paul Talbot-Greaves’ new series unlocks the secrets behind creating better paintings. This month he discusses the importance of good design as he demonstrates how to plan a watercolour landscape
Design is an important element of successful paintings. It’s your plan, like having an architect’s plans for a building. You can of course just start painting but that inevitably leads to alterations and changes in a watercolour can be difficult to disguise successfully. Your design plan should consider the story you want to convey, how you might go about the painting process to enhance the picture, what additions or omissions you might consider as well as the arrangement of shapes, values, tones, and colour. If you’ve not given design much consideration before, or you have but with not much success, I hope this article will provide some valuable hints and tips for getting the best out of your landscape painting.
In the field
Whether you are painting en plein air, making sketches or taking photos, the basic building block of a compositional grid is a good starting point. The grid divides your picture space into three sections horizontally and three sections vertically, and you can use this as a guide to arrange the bigger shapes of your scene for harmony and balance. Use a picture finder tool or a camera lens with grid selected to help you gain a good balance of offset shapes into spaces of one third. There are no rules other than try to make your landscape appear interesting with a mixture of large and small shapes and maybe a lead into the focus. The focus of your painting is the main interest around your story and needs to be emphasised and strong enough to keep pulling the viewer’s attention. A focus can consist of anything that will continually draw notice such as a building, a patch of light, a flock of sheep, people, a lone tree and so on.
When I’m in the landscape, I look out for either a focus or the supporting elements of a painting. The supporting elements are often as important as the focus and may comprise of a strong value background or a large, lit foreground space or an interesting line or curve leading into a scene provided by a wall or a track. Sometimes they all appear as a readymade design but that isn’t always the case. If I see a potentially strong focus I will move around to try to place it against a good or better backdrop or see if I can find an interesting lead in. If I see the supporting elements but no focus, I will think about how I might impose a focus into the scene. When you become accustomed to working in this way you begin to see your field subjects as paintings, and you might have on-thespot ideas like making the background darker or removing a lot of distracting clutter to improve the image. If you’re painting en plein air it pays to spend some time on this, maybe making a few thumbnail sketches to quickly thrash out your ideas before you commit to the painting.
In the studio
If you are painting in the studio you are likely to have some sketches and a series of photographs to work from and can spend a bit more time making decisions about the balance of values, enhancing a focus, trying out colour mixes and so on. You might also have a databank of images to call on if you
wanted to add something. An invaluable tool for adjusting composition is photo editing software for your computer. Basic programmes that come with software packages such as Microsoft photos are good enough for cropping images and adjusting the exposure and colour saturation, but to make real adjustments it pays to invest in a dedicated software package and perhaps a tablet and pen. I use a Wacom USB tablet with a pressure sensitive pen with a programme called Serif PhotoPlus X6. There are many other packages around, such as Adobe Photoshop. There are also photo editing packages for iPads and tablets, so take a browse around the internet if you’ve never used editing apps before.
With this kind of set up you can take a photograph and not only alter the lighting and colour, but you can draw on it with the pen, clone areas, remove bits and so on, so that you end up with a digital image of your plan exactly as you envisaged. If you make a change that you don’t like, just press undo, and go back to your previous edit.