Demonstration Review  -  February 2025 

Artist: Stephen Coates
Subject: Vision and Composition  -  Medium: Watercolour

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This is Stephen’s third visit to BADAS.  He is a professional watercolour tutor and published author. ‘The Watercolour Enigma’ has been republished as ‘Complete Watercolor guide for Beginners’.

Watercolour is the most challenging medium of all. Artists make a lot of mistakes when they draw. Often artists are not painting a scene that actually exists. 

Stephen shared a presentation about how we see and perceive things. How our brains are interpreting what our eyes see. We only see a portion of one degree that is sharply in focus. It was demonstrated how perspective can trick us in the way of the way of the two lines with arrows. Another ‘illusion’ is the perception of colour or tone where they relate to other colours/tones in close proximity. 

We often get colours wrong and never paint shadows dark enough. A white square on a checkerboard in shadow is the same shade as a grey one that isn’t. 

If you work on composition, you can trigger a response in the viewer. Stephen focused on shape, alignment and balance. 

Shape: Rafael and Lowry used triangles. 

Alignment: there’s nothing wrong with moving things. Avoid putting the horizon right in the middle. About a third tends to work best but it can vary. Avoid putting the subject in the middle - by placing to one side it allows you to move through the picture. Don’t put people walking out of the picture. 

Balance: using contrast and things like a stormy sky to balance the picture. 

When painting with watercolour don’t keep messing about with it, any granulation you get by allowing paints to settle will be destroyed. 

Stephen paints quickly using a large brush.  A goat hair hake soaks up a lot of paint and soaks the paper quickly. 

Tonight, Stephen used five colours on his flat palette:

Ultramarine (well known for granulating)

Light red

Raw sienna

Burnt sienna

Burnt umber

Light red was added to ultramarine to make a plum colour.

 

Stephen chose to wet the paper and then add the paint. Use undiluted paint when wetting the paper. Bockingford 425gsm - can get away with 300gsm. 

Raw sienna was used with some burnt sienna to give the glow of a sunset and plum was added around it. It’s at this stage that we have the temptation to fiddle. 

A ‘Foliator’ hog hair brush was used to add background foliage. Water was blended at the horizon using a synthetic brush, similar to sable. This created an area of mist. 

For the foreground the hake brush was used with neat colour - raw and burnt sienna, plum and burnt umber, leaving white patches, giving the impression of puddles of water. 

Once the base was down, Stephen used a hairdryer to nearly dry the picture. Trees were drawn using a good quality B pencil (almost 100% graphite). With wood pulp paper like Bockingford it is possible to pull the paint away using a flat brush with water and then blotting with kitchen paper, negating the need for masking fluid. This was done with all three trees to add light to them. Then water was added to the light side and plum added to the darker one. Where it touched the water it added shape and bark-like texture. Stephen paints branches upside down as they are easier to control if you are working towards you. 

Test brush strokes before committing to a painting. Using a rigger brush side on and flicking up you can get great texture like tufts of grass. To finish, Stephen used a sword liner to play with random blades of grass/scrub. 

Stephen said the rest of the painting was impressionist in nature, but after drying, he went in with a rigger and added a bit of bark detail to reveal the trees as silver birches.