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“Kilauea’s Kiss” © Sandy Haight. Watercolor 28″ x 18.5″

People often comment when they see my paintings that they “can’t believe it’s watercolor” when they see the intense colors and textures that I manage to achieve.  I’ve just finished the above watercolor on a full sheet of paper of a rich red Double Hibiscus bloom that reached out and kissed me in Kauai.  I had to zoom in on the photo I took of it and paint it big on a full sheet of watercolor paper for a super impact.

These paintings don’t just dash off the brush in one go but are achieved by building many layers of color glazes.  Since this painting was to be a more monochromatic image I thought I’d experiment with a unique process by painting the values in purples first, then build up the reds on top causing the purple shadows to just disappear!  I was introduced to this process in a book “Building Brilliant Watercolors” by Judy D. Treman and have my students try it out when painting colorful fruit. Below you can see some shots of this painting evolving.

Underpainting establishing values in purple

I start with stretched watercolor paper, soaking it and stapling onto gator board.  When dry I tape the border, draw my guidelines and use masking fluid to protect the whites or light colors from the bigger washes that might invade their spaces.  On this flower I also loosely tinted in yellows first where they would glow through the reds, to ultimately harmonize with the masked popcorn-like anthers, before building the light and dark values in various purples.  This was risky since yellow plus purple can produce grays, which I didn’t want.

First warm colors over purple.

Magically the purples do start to disappear as various reds are built up over them.  Each layer of the textured areas is sprinkled with sea salt while wet which must sit on the surface undisturbed until dry.  You can now see the masked areas clearly. They will be detailed in later after the petals are developed.

Deepening layers of reds.

Notice the textures building in the salted areas contrasting nicely with smoother petals. Because of the transparency of watercolor, each textured layer will glow through the subsequent color glazes.  The frustrating part of watercolor is that the paint dries much lighter than it appears while wet so it often takes about 4 or more passes over each area for me to build the intensity I want.  Each layer refines and adds richness and depth so it does pay off in the end.

Detail – Mask removed, More salt.

Detail – “pom poms” started. More salted layers.

As each petal is painted, its neighbor calls out for adjustment, so round and round I go until they are all interacting happily in relationship with each other.

Almost finished. Tape removed.

I always love the moment of removing the drafting tape to reveal the clean, sharp borders of the painting. What do you think?  Overall, I love the outcome, but decided that I enjoy painting more when I mix the colors on the paper as I go along, from light to dark, instead of this more analytical process of painting the dark values first. I’ll happily add this to my collection of Floralscapes.

The painting at the top of the post is the final “kiss” and available as the original or as a custom sized giclee print on paper or canvas if you want to warm up your walls with love from the tropics.

Yellowstone Aspens watercolor © Sandy Haight

A trip to Yellowstone in mid September brought me up close and personal with the turning of the Aspen leaves to all shades of yellows and oranges.  Their bright colors can’t help but make you feel sunny as they flicker in the breezes.  Getting close, the masses of color aren’t the only theme as the spaces in between the sprigs take on more importance.

I used this composition to teach a glazing process for creating colorful neutral backgrounds to my fall students at Bellevue College. I layered a thin flat glaze of Aureolin yellow, followed by thin glazes of Rose Madder, then Cobalt blue after each layer dried to create a luminous gray. This was too pale and flat alone for my interest, but made a foundation for adding more color wet on wet to blend and flow to enhance the neutral foundation.  After 6-10 layers of color here’s what the background looked like before I even started painting the main attraction….the leaves.

Luminous neutral background washes-Yellowstone Aspens © Sandy Haight

In the beginning I masked out the leaves so I could brush the background colors freely over the whole surface.  This image shows the mask removed, the veins sketched in and ready for color with additional masking fluid added to the lightest areas preserving the white of the paper. Still, when the leaves were painted, the background needed to have more blues and greens to tie in the green leaf in the lower right to make it feel like it belonged to the painting, so more layers were carefully added to unify the painting. What do you think? I think it works and I’ll add it to my watercolor gallery on https://sandyhaightfineart.com and enjoy the rest of the yellow Seattle autumn.

Young Elk, watercolor by Sandy Haight

I decided it was time for me to record my painting process from reference photo to finish when one of my students, Rodney Hill, documented the different stages of completing his class watercolor painting.  His printouts were of great value to future students explaining the steps they would use to paint realistically using photo references.  Watch how my watercolor painting of a young elk evolved. The reference photo is at the end of this post.

1. Once the paper is stretched by stapling soaked watercolor paper to gator board, dried, and outlines of the shapes transferred to the paper, a mask is applied to the foreground subject to preserve the white of the paper.  Some of the flowers and lighter grasses are also masked to allow a free and loose underpainting. The mask has a yellow tint in order to see where it has been applied.  (This 1st  photo is not lit correctly).

1. Mask and 1st Underpainting

2. More background is added including the mountains and the dark forested hillside.  More washes are layered onto the underpainting of the field.

2. Background added

3. Not being a landscape painter, I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle all the texture of the field but was eager to paint the subject. I procrastinated dealing with that dilemma and I removed the mask a bit early.  Usually I build up the background to a near finished state before removing the mask. Now all the whites are available for adding in pure color or lighter tints.

3. Masking is removed

4. At this point, the elk is painted (my favorite part) and the background herd, rocks and bushes are added as well as more foreground layers of washes and textures to make all the masked grasses blend better into the field.  Now that the animal is developed, though, I realize that the dark background hillside is demanding way too much attention, distracting the viewer from the beauty of the elk by advancing with its strong values.  Do you agree? I need to tone that down. My other concern was that having applied mask to details in the field I was stuck with the task of defining the grasses and wildflowers more clearly than I might have liked. Since this started out as a demo painting, it worked well for teaching purposes by showing various ways of using and applying masking fluid.

4. Elk & more grass textures painted in

5. Yes, it is possible to fix watercolor errors, to a point.  I scrubbed away at that dark hillside to force it to take its proper, more subtle place in the back of the picture.  I tried to straighten the horizon line a bit which was at an awkward downhill slant.  This was as light as I could get it, and it still has some room to create a sense of the trees by adding more glazes of color.

5. Background hill scrubbed lighter

6. I masked the yellow flowers again so that I could intensify the foreground with further washes and grass detail while preserving the color of the flowers. It’s hard to see the little blobs of mask over the flowers.

6. Flowers masked again

7. Here’s the finished painting again from top of the post, with trees suggested in the hillside, grasses more defined and yellows enhanced. Another layer of sky was added and more layers of washes in the mountains to finish it.

7. Young Elk, final watercolor by Sandy Haight

8. Below is the photo I used for reference.  Driving out of Rocky Mountain National Park we passed this brave young elk, grazing right by the roadside.  I’m not sure I’ll ever be a landscape painter…it’s hard to improve on Nature, but I loved painting this beautiful animal who let me get quite close for a photo.

8. Rocky Mountain Elk photo by Sandy Haight