Don’t let your internal critic, or your busy schedule tell you there’s no time to paint.
Pick up a brush and soften some dark-valued watercolor (which can be diluted for lighter values) and make a quick sketch.
Focus on the shadow shapes you see, don’t think about anything else.
Even if your end result isn’t as accurate as your typical results you’ve learned something useful in a short period of time. You have practiced see the overall impact of light on a subject.
Things might seem blurry and unformed at first, but everything you see in this approach will be something you start to look for all the time when you are sketching. Your sketches will become more dimensional and visually interesting.
Best of all, these types of sketches, made with one color thinned with water to different values, allows you to practice your value recognition and mixing skills, quickly, without any need for elaborate analysis of the colors you see in the subject.
Next time you sketch a similar subject your mind will understand the value it needs for a specific area and you’ll have free space in your brain to think about which colors on your palette you want to mix.
This is a building block that will allow you to grow your skills.
You might find you enjoy it so much that you branch out and work with two colors—such as a complementary pair which will allow you to play with color temperature in your mixes as well as value. (Most of my sketches of my black and white coated Alaskan Malamutes were done with a single complementary pair: Burnt Sienna and PB60 Indanthrone Blue. If they were sunlit, the Burnt Sienna dominated the mix bringing out warm tones, and vice versa.) Pick a complementary pair that gives you a lot of value range. I typically suggest students avoid a yellow-purple pair when starting this exercise, because yellow is so high-key in all its dilutions, and purple is always so strident. If those are your favorite colors, don’t worry, after some practice with other complementary pairs you’ll be able to wield yellow and purple artfully.
If you don’t want to use a complementary pair maybe there is something at hand? In this second image I worked with some leftover paints.
In this last image I had a plate of leftover red watercolors I had been testing. I started sketching with one of the dark reds (see the nose area where that is still visible. But then went with just a cooler red and mixed it with various amounts of PB60 to get different purples. (Still keeping to essentially 2 pigments to juggle warm and cool and play with the values.) And I focused on the larger shapes with a #10 watercolor round before going in at the end with the very thin script liner brush.
You can also use analogous colors for this type of exercise. Analogous colors are those that are near each other on the color wheel. Pick a pair that some how augment the usefulness of each other.
In this sketch I used Saturn red, which washes to a sort of orange. I mixed it in areas with Burnt Sienna because I wanted a darkness and still wanted to retain the warmth.
I was working on a recycled watercolor paper (defunct) in a daily portrait painting project I ran as my 2018 International Fake Journal project that year. (Working in March instead of April because of scheduling issues.)
This direct brush painting was done mostly with a #10 watercolor brush. Some of the thinnest lines were made with the same brush. I focused on shapes and not line. A shape was created and then dissolved back, because the paper allowed that.
Below is the full sketch from 2018.
While I was pulling up the analogous colors option I found the following ink wash sketch.
Again, this sketch is direct brush painting, but it uses ink only. I used a petal shaped mixing palette and filled the wells with different dilutions of ink from light to straight ink. I still did some dilution and restatement on the page as I worked, but I found it helpful to have the starting point of the value range in the palette. This points out clearly how the exercise I’m discussing will really help you learn your water control, an important skill for watercolor or ink work.
Great subjects for this approach
Still life set ups, especially with fruits and vegetables. Because of their volume you can work on form shadows
Your realistic dinosaur figures (I know you’ve got them or want to get one!)
Landscapes out your window or at the park. This is a great exercise in simplifying what you see into value shapes
And of course your family members, especially pets.
Have some fun experimenting.
