Impressions in Watercolour - Turner's techniques

One of Turner's ways of working was to start with, effectively, colour blots, broad areas of colour. And I'd like to point out that Turner, I believe, worked with these colours in this order as he worked. Warm, cool, darks, lights and details. When he was travelling, I don't believe he taped down his work at all, or even pinned it down. I'm going to take some cartridge paper, I wet it on one side, thoroughly, turn it over and it sticks to the board. I can work on it quite fiercely. Now come warm wash. Now I'm not using a brush that we can be sure Turner had, but we do know that they had large brushes. I'm using this because it suits me. I'm warming the sheet with yellow ochre, bringing in some light red. So it's a colour beginning. There's a somewhat of a reserved area in the middle which I'm now getting rid of. Now, working with quite solid amounts of paint, I'm charging here. I'm building up a near-ground area. These are hills in the background. Now raw umber, quite thickly. Fits with the description we have of Hawkesbury Fawkes, who was the son of one of Turner's patrons, was at breakfast one morning with Turner and his father when Hawkes said to Turner, could you paint a full-sized man of war of the fleet on a standard piece of watercolour paper? This is his description we have. Turner began by pouring wet paint onto the paper until it was saturated. He tore and he scratched and he scrabbled at it in a kind of a frenzy and the whole thing was chaos, but gradually, and is it by magic, the lovely subject with all its exquisite minutia came into being. I'm going to add some darker colour. This is burnt umber and quite thickly, quite saturated with colour at this point. Now that's a broad composition established. Now at this point I'm going to start bringing back light and the areas that are still wet will start to wipe away and this I think has a lot in common with Turner's way of beginning his oil paintings with rag. Now I'm using this bit of tissue, it could be a bit of cloth or blotter or anything, to take paint away from there. I'm still working with warm colours, there's no cool yet, building up texture and surface. But using the marks that the brush makes to coax the paint rather than forcing it to do anything. Out of chaos we're starting to see a landscape appearing. Now I'm going to bring in some cool colour and this will be a touch of cobalt blue, which I'll thin right down, watercolour itself. It's mixed with a binder, water is the carrier, binder is the glue that holds it and enables it to set and become a truly permanent part of wherever it lands, otherwise it would only adhere, I guess, like dust. And here are the mountains starting to appear in the distance there. Now I'm going to start using a sponge, which of course is a traditional tool for watercolour, to lift up more up at the top here, to shape those mountains and I can also use that to pick out areas of light here in the foreground, to stipple. Now if we think of Turner as the painter of light, this is a way of bringing light back into the picture. So now I've got warms, cool, I'm going to add some more cool in here, in fact I think I'll lift this away and make this come down to something here where there'll be a lake, building some rocks in the foreground. Now I'm using this cool colour, cobalt blue, to drop into that area here, and you can see this texture there hopefully. Now some dark, I could be doing this with almost any brush, but I'm using a very large brush so I can move this process along for you. So, so far we've used warm, cool, starting to build darks, although I haven't done much heavily yet, and now I'm going to lift out a light from there, and this is the most exciting part of it for me. I've got a brush which is wetted, then squeezed out, it's quite a hard brush, using a nylon brush. A saber would have done this too, which is a little harder than maybe Turner's brush might have been, but here goes. The aim is to wet the area that I'm going to wipe out first, so that I can lift out that area here, and we start to see the castle appearing. Now that's a key, to now go and add, to start lifting light all over the place, which is the description we have of, from Leighton Leach talking about Turner being able to lift out lights with great speed, and when you start bringing the light back in, the picture starts to come to life. Now invariably in Turner's case, there would be little figures down here lifted out, or buildings. I'll just make rocks and ground shapes, but they play a very important part in the composition. So this is really using negative to create something that's solid. In this case, a white, reflections on rocks, I'll show you some up close of this sort of thing. If I wipe it very fiercely, I'll go down to the white paper. Sizing in paper is a very important part of the whole thing. One of the things you have to bear in mind when you're working with watercolour, is that when you're working on the paper, you're changing the nature of the surface of the paper, and the size that's within it. As you work with the paper, the paint tends to soak into it, regardless of how much size is there. So the more you've worked the paper, the harder it is to remove paint from the surface. Now let's lift a little bit of light from the lake here. First of all, I'm sort of play of light, we associate with Turner, that sort of effect there, over which I will work later on with texture. Now I'm going to lift a line here, which suggests the lake in the distance. So I've got a larger brush, I've wrung it out, and I'm going to wipe along underneath the ruler here, and by wiping that out, suddenly we have the sense of, that that must be a lake in the distance. Now next would come lots and lots of small details, which you know I'm not particularly interested in. I have a split brush, and I'm quite sure that Turner and many other artists had brushes similarly which would give surface effect. Now I'm putting on raw umber here. Of course, we know that if you put too many colours together, they lose their clarity and become muddy, and that's always a danger, but you'll notice that in the way I deal with that personally, is I try to leave the simple passages of wash alone. This rather glowing blue, this lighter area there, and I put all my details in one or two areas. But right at the moment, this is a demonstration, it's not about my approach, or about sort of showing the way that someone like Turner might have built up a surface like this. And remember these marks have come out of the paint itself, and I get a lovely light raw. I could take my sponge here, and I can pick up paint with it, I've loaded it with yellow ochre and raw umber, so I can draw with it, and press it. See the surface texture I'm getting? Yep, you're seeing the detail now. Now comes some darks, and I'm doing this with burnt umber. On their own, these marks look rather heavy, but if I dry it slightly, then wipe some of it away, what appeared overly heavy marks, now start to form into rock texture. And so it goes. Now, let's have a look at the mountains. At the moment there are no details on those mountains. There are two techniques I'm going to use to add some detail there. The first is bringing paint in, the other is disturbing the paint and moving it around. So rather than making the mountains any darker, I want the mountains to look as far away as they are now, but to have a surface where we're glimpsing through the atmosphere. So I've just got a brush that is theoretically got clean water in it. So here goes, just for the fun of it, it may not move very much, but you can see some light coming in there now. I'll pick up a little bit of pigment, I'm picking up a bit of yellow ochre. Now my inspiration for this is the Swiss paintings, I absolutely adore them. I've spent some time in the Swiss mountains, particularly around Lucerne, trying to find places where we know the Turner worked, and his exact locations. Oh, you can probably hear the birds in my garden chirping away. We're into summer now. One of the things that I often look for in Turner paintings are these lovely little light areas lifted out all over the place. There's a tiny little boat on the lake, and another one here, and buildings here. Now at this point a painter like Turner could and would add whatever details he wanted to finish the setting. Maybe a rock there might be an interesting one. So from my point of view the important part is over the colour harmonies and the overall composition and balance and so on. So here we are, let's have one last look at it under a mat. Remember it's only a study, not a finished art.