Longtime members know that I'll occasionally share a piece of artwork I've done if it has some relevance to the Ranch. This watercolor painting was based on a photo taken by our old, dear friend Solveig Haugland.
John Todd wrote:What is the difference between "water colors" and "oil colors"?
They're very, very different!
The biggest difference (besides the fact that watercolors clean up with water, and oil only with solvents, yuck) is that oil paint is opaque, and watercolors are transparent. This has a profound effect on how you paint.
Let's say you wanted to paint a picture of a zebra on a grassy plain. If you were using oils, you could do it by painting the grass, and then painting a black horse on top of it, and then putting white stripes on top of the horse -- it would look just perfect. That means that with oils you can do a lot of experimenting and kind of "sneak up" on your picture, slowly refining it over time. If you decide to add a second zebra next to the first one, you can do that!
But with watercolors, there's no white paint, only the white of the paper. If you want to paint the zebra picture, you have to paint the grass and the black stripes, carefully leaving the white of the paper where the white stripes have to be. It requires a lot more planning up front! Many watercolor paintings are all about how you use white (and light colors in general;) it's a way of showing off. If you look at my painting above, those white umbrella poles, and the white pilings under the building, and the signs, and the roof, all took a lot of planning to get right.
Another way in which oil and watercolors differ is that oil paints are thick and viscous, and they stay just where you put them, while watercolors can flow over the paper, soak in, mix together, etc. The watercolorist has to become a master of guiding the natural tendency of the paint to move around, and use that to his advantage. To use my painting above as an example again, much of the variegated color in the sky, water, and clouds comes from natural movement of flowing paint, and I had to guide it to create the effects I wanted. There's a nice element of controlled chaos to it -- you can never be 100% sure of what you're going to get. And there's no erasing, no mulligans. You have to take what you get!
John Todd wrote:So how to know if I'm looking at watercolored paints or oilcolored ones?
Which method is used most by famous painters like Degas or Paul Cézanne?
The "Old Masters" all used oils, originally on wood, later on stretched canvas. Degas and Cézanne worked mainly in oils, too. In oil paintings, you can sometimes see the texture of the canvas, and especially in more modern work, you can see brush strokes and the physical blobs of paint they leave behind, giving a three-dimensional structure. Impressionism was all about those blobs! Oil paintings generally have a fussed-over look to them, because an oil painting is never really done -- you can always go back and rework some part of it, even years later.
Traditionally, watercolors have been used for loose sketches, often as a way of coloring drawings made with pen, like this lovely image by Jennifer Young:
But there's a new school of watercolorists who have elevated it to the equal of oil painting in artistic merit, including photorealists like Steve Hanks:
In watercolor, you won't see that three-dimensional texture on the surface, nor will you see the texture of canvas. You might see the texture of the paper (you can see it in my beach painting way up above, it's very obvious in much of the sky.) Good watercolor paintings have a fresh, crisp, luminous quality that you rarely see in oil paintings. The layers of translucent colors give a certain richness and complexity that's impossible to duplicate otherwise.
But sometimes it's just hard to tell!
Steve Fahlbusch
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Joined: Sep 18, 2000
Posts: 393
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EFH
This thread is certainly not MD.
Ernest Friedman-Hill
author and iconoclast
Marshal
EFH does fantastic work. A few years ago, he solicited photos of people's faces so he could practice pencil/charcoal drawings (not sure which). We sent him a photo of our daughter. He was then kind enough to send his drawing to us, which is now framed in my bedroom, and I have a print of the scan of the drawing posted in my cube, three feet from where I'm sitting right now.
When he has a national touring show, we'll be there!!!
Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
nice! Watercolor paintings look smudgy when you hold them close. But as you move them away, all the small changes start to blend and the picture becomes clearer. Loved the use of {blue+white} around the horizon.
Most artists, even those who do fantasy art, use models of some kind, especially to get the lighting right. I have a great book by James Guerne (the guy who did the Dinotopia books) where he shows his methods, which involve drawing from clay models, toys, people in costumes, etc.
People who do realistic art purely from imagination usually end up with stuff that looks good but is factually wrong in some ways. Burne Hogarth, a famous illustrator who taught at UCLA for many years and wrote a number of popular texts on drawing people, falls in this catagory -- his drawings look great but represent impossible proportions and contain anatomical errors.
Anyway, aside from cartoons for my kids, I always use some kind of reference!
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