Category Archives: tonal sketching

DAVID BELLAMY GLAZING A WATERCOLOUR FOR ATMOSPHERE

Posted on by
2

The glazing technique is an extremely powerful way of creating atmosphere in your landscapes, and is a method I use regularly. This involves laying a transparent or semi-transparent wash of watercolour over part of a painting that has already been painted. You need to ensure that the paper is completely dry before laying on the glaze, although if you are very experienced you can on occasion get away with laying it on a damp surface, although it is easy to end up with a mess in that case!

This is a watercolour sketch of a scene high up in the Sundance Mountains in the Canadian Rockies, painted in a cartridge A4 sketch-book, and is almost a monochrome. Throughout I’ve used a mixture of French ultramarine and cadmium red in various strengths of tone, firstly laying on a wash of a light version and when this had dried applying detail with a darker tone of the same mix to indicate the shadow areas on the peaks. When all the background detail had been painted I waited till it dried and then applied a glaze of the same mixture only making this darker above the large boulders and lightening it as it crept up the face of the far mountain. This softened some of the lower detail and created a sense of misty atmosphere in the valley below. I then completed the foreground detail on rocks and trees. This scene is featured in my Watercolour and Beyond book published by Search Press. It is packed with watercolour techniques and methods to enhance your paintings.

The glaze method can be used on all types of landscape, not just mountain scenery, and limiting the colours in this way further enhances the mood. With sharp contrasts in the foreground the sense of misty atmosphere is further enhanced. The technique is also great for warming up or cooling down a passage in your composition, or if you wish to highlight a particular part of it, such as a building, summit or other feature.

One extremely effective tip is to try this method out on an old watercolour, perhaps one that hasn’t really worked for you, so dig out some of you old painting and have some wonderfully experimental moments with them.

DAVID BELLAMY Tonal Sketching a Landscape

Posted on by
3

Welcome to my first blog of 2025 and I wish you all a rather belated Happy New Year. May you have much success with your paintings!

As you may know, I am very keen on sketching, both for the sheer enjoyment of sketching a scene amidst nature, and for recording a composition to work up as a painting back in the studio. On expeditions, holidays and trips they are also marvellous ways of retaining memories of activities, people and places.

This time I’d like to highlight the benefits of tonal sketching in pencil, that is, where you include a lot of tonal areas rather than simply rely on a linear approach. This canal scene illustrates how the dark areas bring out the shape and character of the bridge, the trees and boats, while the medium tones both link the light and dark features and suggest detail and minor shapes. These medium tones become very important in an atmospheric sketch where you may be depicting mist, cloud, sunshine and other less strident features. I used a 4B pencil on a page of A4 size cartridge paper.

As you can see, in this case I have liberally noted down colours and at the top right drawn a larger version of the prow of the narrow-boat so that certain small details become clearer. This is useful if I will be working up a large painting later. Apart from the fact that you are recording the scene in detail and gaining an understanding of it, some details of which might become lost in a photograph of the place, you are laying out a ready-made composition and will probably not need to do a studio sketch from the photograph to ensure that everything is as you wish for in the finished painting.

You may have already seen the new merged Leisure Painter and The Artist magazine, which is packed with great information and illustrations. With so many publications now turning to digital versions I feel it’s so good to support the paper versions – I’m not so happy messing about on small screens! I have an article in the current issue on sketching during my trip to Transylvania last summer. Don’t forget to keep warm when you are out sketching!