There is something I find relaxing about negative painting. I know it's hard to believe when it can seem so confusing, but the more you do it the easier it gets and it becomes an almost mindless progression into your background.
Weird I know, but that is one of the things I like about painting grapes. I can use a multitude of different hues for the leaves, tons of layers to visually create more, and still be able to see one hue through the other. I LOVE watercolor! You just can't get the transparency in other mediums as easily as you can in watercolor.
In my last class on negative painting, we had started a grape painting with the intent of doing the leaves in a negative manner. Of course everything takes longer than expected, and no one, myself included, finished before the class ended. I promised I would take pictures as I progressed, and I will continue to post them as I go along.
I have always thought watching myself paint must be kind of like watching submarine races. Not much to see, and it takes forever🤣 I am a slow painter so bare with me on this😉
Weird I know, but that is one of the things I like about painting grapes. I can use a multitude of different hues for the leaves, tons of layers to visually create more, and still be able to see one hue through the other. I LOVE watercolor! You just can't get the transparency in other mediums as easily as you can in watercolor.
In my last class on negative painting, we had started a grape painting with the intent of doing the leaves in a negative manner. Of course everything takes longer than expected, and no one, myself included, finished before the class ended. I promised I would take pictures as I progressed, and I will continue to post them as I go along.
I have always thought watching myself paint must be kind of like watching submarine races. Not much to see, and it takes forever🤣 I am a slow painter so bare with me on this😉
This is the first bunch in my composition that I had done in class.
Here I am laying in some base colors for the second bunch. At this stage I've done most of the negative painting in the leaves, but have done very little of the detail work on them. You can see just a little of the veining done on the leaf at the top of the page. I have put in some of the dark background behind them as you can see.
Here are some more of the base hues for the second group of grapes. Notice that I am using a lot of similar but different hues for these. As they progress they will become closer in hue, but I like them to be slightly different to add variety and interest. Now I know that a lot of pictures will show that the grapes really do all look almost the same, but I find this more interesting visually and after all they're MY grapes so I can do what I want 😆
If you look very closely you will see that I have changes the size of some of the grapes and also their position in the composition. I decided I did not have enough in the foreground and will be moving some forward.
If you look very closely you will see that I have changes the size of some of the grapes and also their position in the composition. I decided I did not have enough in the foreground and will be moving some forward.
Here I've got a base hue painted on all my grapes. At this point I get bored (squirrel!) and move on to the rest of the composition.
I want to see how the values and hues in the whole composition play together so I start adding in light washes on the rest of the painting. I am leaving the right side diagonal unpainted to create an asymmetrical composition.
Here I've added in more values for the wine in the glass, fleshed in the label I chose (Black Star Winery in TC), added some more detail in the leaves and a couple of layers of dry brushing to create the cork effect. I also went back into the original grape cluster and added some more layers to some of the grapes. I find that if I add in multiple layers the hues end up richer and brighter. Those of you who were in the last class think of the apples we did and how they popped off the background after using many layers.
Back to the races lol (submarine races that is😂) Small things happening here, working on the bottle, starting to add in the darks in the glass. It is kind of hard to see what is going on with the glass because of the masking I have done. As you know masking fluid can pick up dirt and appear as paint until you pull it off. Also, I am using a small amount of brown in my glass reflections because of the wine barrel it sits on, so it is hard to tell what areas are paint and what areas are the yellow masking fluid. I've added some more green in the bottle and started adding reflections of grapes, and I also worked on the label at the top to darken it down. I have not yet started anything I may see through the bottle (or wine glass) which I have to remember will be distorted by the glass. A little more dry brushing in the cork and few more details in the leaves.
Again my goal here in skipping around is to be aware of the overall values of all the hues in the composition so that the areas I want to be focal points come forward and are not lost in all the detail I have created with the negative painting.
Remember you can create emphasis in many different ways. In this composition I am going to use hues and values to draw attention to the grapes, bottle and glass.
Again my goal here in skipping around is to be aware of the overall values of all the hues in the composition so that the areas I want to be focal points come forward and are not lost in all the detail I have created with the negative painting.
Remember you can create emphasis in many different ways. In this composition I am going to use hues and values to draw attention to the grapes, bottle and glass.
A couple more pictures before I call it quits for today, I decided to look at the glass some more to make sure I was ok with the shape. It appears to be leaning-hope not I did use a T-square so it may be my photo 😳. Regardless, the overall shape was good. I used a piece of tracing paper to trace one side then flipped it over to compare to the other side. An easy quick way to check you have not lost your symmetry. I had to pull off the masking fluid - it was just to confusing to figure out what was paint and where my whites were. As you can see there is a lot more white than it looked in the previous photo. I added a little more magenta to the wine then turned my attention to the leaves behind the stem. There was not enough contrast so I ended up darkening down the whole leaf area.
Here I've gone back into the barrel and started dry brushing texture for both the banding and the wood. I've adjusted one side of the barrel and will do the other also to make the oval a little tighter. I also measured from the edge of the paper to the stem of the glass top and bottom to double check I was not tilting. Whew it's ok🤗