Transparent and Opaque: Tonally Graded Wash/Overlaying Washes/Opaque Colour Mixing

Exercises: Tonally graded wash and Overlaying washes.

I tried this exercise both with acrylic and with oil paint and made notes in my sketchbook about the handling of each.

I started off using the acrylic paint and my first few attempts were really very poor. Partly because of the rapid drying of the paint, I ended up with a page of stripes rather than a subtle tonal gradation. The other problem I encountered was that mixing too much water with the paint caused it to completely lose its structure so I ended up with water with a few granules of pigment which seemed to deposit themselves unevenly on the paper. I used violet and french ultramarine. The ultramarine seemed particularly grainy.

I kept trying and eventually ended with some passable graded washes:

The layered washes on the left side of the above photograph were created by layering a wet wash over a dry one. The right side washes were layered wet into wet. The wet into dry layering was more controllable. Working wet into wet gave less control but made some interesting marks which could be exploited in paintings.

I then made a number of layered washes both wet into wet and wet into dry with a few of my paints to experiment with colour mixing. Again, working wet into wet created some interesting marks which might be considered faults in the paint application but I quite like them. The wet into wet layered washes of cerulean with yellow ochre were particularly reminiscent of landscape (beachscape in particular)  I also layered washes of colour over a dry wash of cadmium yellow hue and over a dry wash of red to create various mixes.

 

 Exercise: Opaque Colour Mixing

The object of this exercise was to try to recreate the colours and tones of some of the transparent graded washes but in opaque paint by using white paint to create the lighter tomes rather than the white of the paper showing through the paint. I chose a single colour graded wash of ultramarine, on overlaid wash of cerulean with yellow ochre and a graded wash of ultramarine and violet to attempt to reproduce. The washes had been created with oil paint diluted with turps - I had tried to create the cerulean wash with the paper upright on a easel and this meant that the paint had run down causing drips on the wash - I learnt from this that it is best to apply the washes with the paper flat on a table.

I mixed the opaque colours which I though corresponded pretty well to the tonal values which I had made with the original washes. I was quite happy initially with the results until I photographed the washes side by side in black and white. It then became clear that I wasn't quite as good at identifying the tonal values as I had thought. 

Unfortunately, during this exercise I also found out that I was quite sensitive to turps fumes. Despite having the window wide open I had a splitting headache and was nauseous by the time I finished. I really do prefer the oil paints to the acrylics, however so will search for a suitable alternative to turps - I'll have to use acrylic paint in the meantime