Watercolor of Joseph Chiang

Autumn…It comes and goes so fast…

I tried to make the foliage as spontaneous as possible. One of the challenge in doing this painting is to find the perfect marriage between those quick foliage washes and the branches…and I still haven’t find the best way to paint those leaves edges…

View the whole series in the gallery section and as usually, they are up for bid in the Auction Section.

The Metropolitan Museum is having a great exhibition of JMW Turner’s oil and watercolor paintings; originally I was planning to take pictures for all of his works, but unfortunately photograph was prohibited for this special exhibition. I took only one picture and was caught and warned by a guard there immediately, luckily they won’t force you to delete what you just took.

Turner is a master of light as we can see in this following painting - fisherman at Sea; I did a little research online before posting this picture of mine, and found non of them have good color representation of the original as the one I took. Even though it’s a bit blur (was took in a hurry) but the color is as close as it can get except it’s slightly warmer according to my monitor.

One thing the impresses me most about this oil painting is how the muddy color around the sun become so bright under the contrast of its extremely dark surroundings. When we are painting a bright object, more often than not we would feel it is not bright enough; the real reason for the most part is not the brightness of the objects itself but the darkness of its surroundings. Given enough contrast, the colors will fool our eyes and make us believe muddiness as bright colors.

Make a good use of muddy colors will not only help deepen the space of a painting but also make the painting appears more natural.

After painting Central Park series for more than a year…I feel I got bored sometimes of painting the same theme over and over….

But somehow, I still feel I am very inadequate in the brush works of my trees in my watercolors…

So I thought I should learn from Chinese painting to improve it…

This is a scene from Yellow Mountain in China, I painted it with photo reference.

Tips:

Sky in the evening is not so shinny as the eyes tend to believe.

To make a lightened building shine, apply just a thin layer of wash, and make its surroundings dull.

Work out the overall tone of the entire painting before going into small details; it helps build the atmosphere.

Tips:

The table is slightly tilted to allow the downward blending of color, creating foliage like texture…

Wet Paper.

Good paper and paints make a big difference; I use 300 lb Arches paper and Sennelier  watercolor; same Arches with different weight also produce different result.

Mixed colors recedes more than primary color.

Reduce hard edges; wet on wet helps achieving this.