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Learn to express yourself through color while painting on location with the in-depth tips and techniques of Working with Color, the fifth volume in the Urban Sketching Handbook series.
Expert watercolorist, illustrator, instructor, and co-founder of Urban Sketchers Montreal Shari Blaukopf shares her essential color tips about color-water ratio, achieving bold color, avoiding muddy washes, painting in layers, and using wet-in-wet techniques.
This essential handbook covers:supplies and materialssample color palettescolor mixingusing limited palettesmonochrome sketchesthe power of complementary colorsusing evocative, expressive colorWith a focus on using watercolor with greater confidence and knowledge, the book also delves into pencil and ink and watersoluble pencils.
The instructional text is enhanced with stunning watercolor illustrations by the author and other expert urban sketchers from beautiful locations around the globe. The illustrations include examples of color swatches showing value; mixing; illustrations of complementary, analogous, and neutral color schemes; and sample galleries.
Working with Color is an indispensable guide for on-location artists looking to expand and strengthen their expressive use of color.
From the Publisher
About The Urban Sketching Handbook Series
The Urban Sketching Handbook series takes you to places around the globe through the eyes and art of urban sketchers.
Architecture and Cityscapes, People and Motion, Reportage and Documentary Drawing, Understanding Perspective, and now Working with Color—each book offers you a bounty of lessons, tips, and techniques for sketching on location for anyone venturing to pick up a pencil and capture the world.
Urban sketching is about engaging with the world around you, truly seeing all its riches and taking the time to capture them on paper.
Working with Color is not a technical guidebook. Instead, my goal is to give you stimulating ideas about how to integrate expressive color into your sketches. Whether you work in pencil, ink, watercolor, or some combination of these, the tips and illustrations in these pages, drawn from an international gallery of sketchers, will inspire you to try new techniques and give you a fresh perspective on the colors in your sketch bag.
Keys to Working with Color
KEY I BASICS
Urban sketching is by definition spontaneous and immediate. In my case, I’ll often pause to sketch on my way to work or other outings. Having the right tools at hand makes it easier, and also means I’m likely to sketch more often. If my sketching bag is packed and by the door, I’m ready for whatever the day brings—even if it means sketching in my car on a cold day. After years of trying out different tools, I’ve reduced my kit to the essentials.
KEY II PIGMENTS & COLOR MIXING
There are no rights and wrongs when choosing colors for your palette, because all sketchers have their favorites. But it is helpful to think ahead for different situations. For example, I sometimes add more blues and turquoises to my palette if I’m traveling to the tropics, or swap in some earth tones if I’m headed for the mountains. But when it comes right down to it, I could probably sketch my way through any latitude and elevation with just three tubes of paint: a cool red, a deep blue, and a bright yellow. With those three pigments I can mix an infinite range of brights, darks, and neutrals.
KEY III COLOR & VALUE
Values are the spice of any sketch. Or, to use a more visually apt metaphor, the salt and pepper. A sketch composed entirely of middle value tones will look flat or unfinished. The eye wanders, seeking and failing to find a point of interest. But add a few darks and . . . it pops!
You can’t really talk about sketching in color without talking about values—the colors’ relative lightness or darkness. So what do these all-important lights and darks do? They inject contrast and variety. More importantly, they create a focal point—a place that draws and rewards the eye.
GALLERIES
KEY IV LIMITED COLOR
It seems odd to write a book about color and include a chapter about reducing the number of colors you use. But, despite having palettes filled with several dozen colors, I often severely limit my choices when I’m sketching.
Using a limited palette—and by that I mean narrowing your choices to one, two, or three pigments—immediately solves the perennial problem of which color best represents what you see.
KEY V COLOR RELATIONSHIPS
So far we’ve looked at tonal values and at the building blocks of using color. We’ve sketched with colors one by one, and in twos and threes. Now let’s push our color boundaries further out and begin telling stories in rich, expressive color.
In this chapter, I’ll show you how to use color expressively and with purpose. I’ll show you that by modulating color temperature or by using complementary, bold, or even muted color combinations, you’ll find your color “voice” and be inspired to tell your own color story.
KEY VI NEUTRAL COLORS
Neutral colors don’t get enough respect, often tagged for being dull and boring. But I find transcendent beauty in these colors—the ones you can’t really name—the pearly grays and muted browns that resonate with rich undertones.
Neutral colors are the very backbone of urban scenes, and definitely enjoy pride of place in my sketches, which include lots of stone buildings and are often painted on cloudy days. My preferred technique for obtaining luminous grays is to mix them rather than use pigments straight from the tube.
GALLERY I MOOD & ATMOSPHERE
The next time you sit down to sketch a scene, resist the impulse to plunge right in. Pause for a moment to observe. Time of day, light, and weather are in constant flux, and you want to capture some of that. But pause, also, to feel. Because if you stop and think about it, you are just as changeable, responding to a scene one way today, and another way tomorrow.
GALLERY II LIGHT & SHADOW
Capturing the interplay of light and shadow is the best exercise for developing your skill with concepts we’ve covered in previous chapters—specifically value patterns and color temperature at different times of day. Even in a built environment, light and shadows are as changeable as the sky.
GALLERY III EXPRESSIVE COLOR
Pure color has an immediate and almost physical expressiveness, an emotional charge all its own, quite apart from the subject you’re sketching. This is why some sketchers will insert a blast of red where there is no red, or a note of bright turquoise. These colors may not reflect what’s in the scene, but the sketcher is using color expressively and with purpose: to trigger a sensation in the viewer or to make a statement.
GALLERY IV OTHER MEDIA
There’s a good reason why ink, pencil, and watercolor are the urban sketcher’s favorite tools. They’re light, fast drying, and eminently portable. But I urge you to experiment. Pick up some markers, gouache, colored pencils, or pastels. Try sketching on toned paper or newsprint. Or borrow an iPad and try sketching with a stylus.
Publisher : Quarry Books; Illustrated edition (March 26, 2019)
Language : English
Flexibound : 112 pages
ISBN-10 : 1631596802
ISBN-13 : 978-1631596803
Grade level : Preschool and up
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds