I Critiqued 3 Watercolors… Here’s What Needs Fixing

Having your paintings critiqued is so valuable. The next best thing is watching others have their work critiqued. That's powerful because we all have the same lessons to learn and things to work through when it comes to painting. You're going to want to see all three of these critiques today. There are important lessons to learn in each one. These are paintings that have been submitted to me through my email newsletter group. And if you're not signed up for that and you're a watercolor artist, I'm not sure what you're doing. Watercolor tips and lessons sent straight to your inbox for free. Students find this highly valuable. Follow the link in the description down below if you'd like to sign up for that. First up, Jane painted this lovely coastal scene. Good feeling of light in this. Nice shadows here, good light side shadow side on the rocks. The first thing I like to do is to look at values and I find that the best way to do that is to turn Your reference and your painting black and white. After taking the color away, we can see more of the nuances within the value structure of the scene. And one thing that sticks out to me is we have a good feeling of light here and not as much on the water. And if we were to flip these two values, where you were lighter on the water and more of this middle area on the ground, that would help the focus be more into the center of the scene. One nice thing about this is the light glaring off the ocean preserving more of the light on the water and painting around it such as you did here in the shadow shape will get you that sparkling light look of the sun glaring down on the water. I also want you to notice the value difference in the reference photo between this distant hill and the trees that are a little bit closer up. That little distinction between this value and this value helps organize the painting. It's helpful to really lean into the idea of a foreground, a middle ground, and a background. That allows the painting to have more organization, and it also helps me understand what each area of the painting needs to do in order to make it work. So the foreground, you have plenty of interest here. Let's get the interest a little further into the middle ground of the scene with that little value change I was talking about. And then when we paint this distant hill in the background, you can go a little bit lighter on that hill and just a little bit darker on some of these trees that are in front of the hill. That little distinction. will help the feeling of distance and give your painting more organization. When I see groups of trees like this, I like to squint, turn it black and white, and see how all of this is connected in a very similar value. You need just a little more strength on some of these trees in order to really see that difference. Let's talk about trees for just a minute. Over here on the right, we have this tree, and you did a pretty nice job with this. Nice brushwork, but... I think that this tree here is obstructing the view and kind of keeping us stuck right here in the foreground. So if I was painting this scene, I would eliminate this tree here, but I would keep this one here that leans over the edge and kind of frames in that whole scene. The branches kind of come over this way, and then we have a nice tunnel where we can look through and see more of that sun glaring off the water, which is a good prominent area of The painting adds to the drama of the scene when we're able to capture and feature that light effect. To continue our discussion on trees, we have a lot of branches that are kind of coming up and we've kind of created a similar pattern with branches that are about the same size that have a similar flow. and direction. When we look at the randomness of nature, we want to try to bring some of that into how we paint the scene. So be mindful of branches that are the same size, the same distance apart, and creating kind of a pattern in this part of the painting. But Jane, you've done a nice job on this scene, and I'm hopeful with a few tweaks, you could take on a scene like this again, and you'd be even happier with your end result. Keep up the good work. Next up we have this street scene submitted by Kim and nice work on this Kim. Overall drawing is pretty good. We're going to talk about perspective in just a minute. This painting has a nice light effect and overall you've done a nice job with this. I love that you edited out this big tree here. We didn't really need that. The longer that I paint the more I realized that Part of what we do as painters is learning how to look at something like this and interpret it into a scene. Nice job on adding a few little bit of cars and a little more interest into this street area so we didn't have just a wide open area of the painting. Your question in your email was how to create variety in trees when they look so much alike. They're the same size, the same color. What I do in situations like that is I often will remove trees If this one is not serving us well, this one here on the left, and we don't really need it, I would just take it out. If you want to keep it in, then we can start adding some more variety to it. Take a dash of this red that we have over here and throw that into the second tree, creating a little bit of difference in color. You could make this one a little bit smaller. Finding little ways to add variation is good, but also remembering that you can just eliminate things too that kind of annoy you and bother you. Like that. Let's turn this black and white and get a look at the value structure. I thought your values in this scene were pretty good. I just had a couple suggestions. First of all, let's look at the value of this building in light against the sky in the background. This becomes a tricky thing in painting. When we see something in light, we want to paint it light. But we also have the sky that's a little lighter in the background. When you're painting your first wash of the sky, you can drop in some light value, but value that's a little darker than the sky. Then when you go back in and paint the middle values and the details, this shadow side is what's gonna give this tower enough form. If it looks still just a little light, then you could do a little glaze over that to get it to the right value. A couple of other small tweaks. You could go a little bit darker at the sky. So as we look up in the sky, it's a deeper richer blue and then when we get closer to the horizon it's more diffused and it it looks lighter down here we have some clouds but that bit of deeper richer blue at the top creates a nice vignette around the scene and that subtle little value change can help focus the attention into this part of the scene even more. The other thing is that's tricky to see and to paint is the ground when it's in light. Often we're painting that within the first wash of the scene and when we paint it we are comparing it to the white paper that we haven't covered up yet. When you squint at your scene start comparing the value of the ground even if it's in light To that of the sky. And so right now, if you put one more wash over your ground plane, that would help the light become even more apparent in the scene because you would get a little bit more value difference between what's on the ground and the light value of the sky. Okay, the next thing I want to talk about is perspective. The perspective is not bad here in this scene, but I want to bring up an issue that tends to happen when we paint and draw street scenes. If you trace a line from their head to the top of the vehicle, that's about exactly the same height, and you were pretty close on that. Here's the head. Here's the top of the vehicle. It's just slightly lower than where we would want it to be. When you're painting a scene with flat terrain, the roofs of those cars can be on the same line, so that's not bad. I mean you're pretty close, but scooting that the roof of that car up a little bit and bringing these down, these cars in the distance, ensuring that they stay on that same plane even if they're far off in the distance. That's going to correct a perspective problem. So your ground plane in the background was raising up. If you look here and you trace over the top of the head over to where this building is, her head is above the bottom of that building. But here in the painting, you've raised it up a little bit, so the building and her head Paying attention to those extra little bits of detail on the perspective can help out your paintings quite a bit. And here, the bottom of the building lands right where the top of her head starts. So right here we've created what we call a tangent. I try to be mindful. of where lines meet each other in the painting and I try to overlap them when possible. Nice job on this. I hope those little tweaks to values and talking about perspective can be helpful for you. Keep up the good work. All right, next up we have the scene from Pete and he had a specific question about the background. So I'm going to talk about the background and we'll talk about a few other things along the way. All right, the first thing we're going to do, Pete, is we are going to take We're going to take a look at values. So we're taking away the color. from the reference and the painting. the first thing i noticed when i looked at values was you've inversed the values a little bit. here we have the fisherman in light and that means we would need to negatively paint around him to define him. here you've chosen to make him dark. the water and the shadows and reflections are more dark. here you've made them really light within your painting. the reason why i want to do it this way is mainly because of the light of the scene. so we want to preserve the light on our main character here and paint dark enough on the water around him to really let that pop out and it creates a clear focused point of interest and it makes the light believable in your scene. in the last painting i talked about a tangent See how the shoreline, and tangents happen in the photos. It's not just an error that we create. We have the shoreline of the water land right at the top of his head without any overlap. Well, when I see things like that in scenes, I change them. So I would probably lower this a little bit so his head breaks through that line a little bit more, or I would raise it up just slightly more. But where it is now, where it's sitting right on top of his head. That's a distracting line there, and that's what we call a tangent. It's helpful to think about how to organize your painting with foreground, middle ground, and background. And the foreground we want to use to just lead us into the view. The middle ground is where we want the most contrast, the most attention, the most interest. And then the background is where we really want it to just be a background. We want it to complement what's happening in the scene, but not necessarily be the main area of interest. So when I paint scenes like this, I like to think about how can I abstract the background. And we don't really need to see the sky. You've added some sky in here, we can keep it nice and abstract and simple. One way to help you do that is to really squint. As I look at this reference photo, I'm squinting and I'm thinking about the value, the value of the trees, the little bits of darker areas. And then also there's so much texture here. So when we can squint at it and take away some of that detail, some of the more prominent texture might stand out to us. So there's a few little lines here of lighter colored branches. There's a little bit of dark and some of the shadow. There's a little bit of dark here. But other than that, it's an abstract background with different shades of greens and we can paint it that way and just let colors emerge on the paper and create some softness and then drop in a few of the darks while it's still wet for the shadows. And then when we paint the water, we can bring the same value right down into the water. The reflection here in the water and the trees in the background are very similar in value. And we can paint them in that way. Most students want to have a really clear division between the water and the ground. We can blur that a little bit to make it feel more connected and not separate parts of our painting. Then you can drop in just a few little subtle darks along the shoreline that will give you enough information to organize those two bits. But we don't need a hard line through the scene that separates both of them. Nice work on this Pete. Think about values and painting your person in light and painting the the rich middle values around them to make him stand out. Think about not dividing the water and the shoreline and how you can soften it and abstract the background of your scene. Let me know in the comments down below do you like this format of video and do you find this useful? That's really helpful for me when I'm planning content for you guys. If you would like me to Would you like me to consider reviewing your painting? Follow the link down below to sign up for my watercolor newsletter. And if you're looking to continue your learning, take a look at this video that outlines my layering process that is absolutely crucial when creating light in your scenes.