5 Easily Implemented Strategies To Simplify Your Watercolors

One of the most important things that you can do for your paintings is to simplify.

This is going to make your paintings stronger and more focused - and, believe it or not, it's going to make your scenes easier to paint.

Simplify Your Watercolors When You Implement These 5 Strategies

Here are 5 easy to implement strategies to guide you in this simplification process.

1. Crop Your Reference Photo.

I see a lot of students that take reference photos and just paint everything that's in the scene.

But what you need to do before you start even drawing your scene is to crop your photo. When you're cropping your photo, think about the most important area of the painting. This is where the rule of thirds come into play. The rule of thirds is a composition rule that helps artists create focal points in their paintings.

Here’s how it works: you put two even lines horizontally across your scene and two vertical lines. Where those lines intersect are the thirds of your scene.

Put an area of interest on one of these thirds. That way it's not too close to the edge of your painting. It's not too close into the center of your scene, but it's sitting in a good prominent position. 

As you crop your photo, also think about whether you want the focus on what’s happening on the ground or in the sky? If you're painting a scene where the sky is more prominent, you could have a lower horizon line and show more of the sky. If there's more interest down on the ground, you can raise up that horizon line and have what's going on in the ground be a more prominent area of your painting. 

Cropping is a good way to simplify your scene even before you get started painting.

2. Remove Things That Don't Add Value to the Painting.

Sometimes in scenes there are things that just don't quite look right - things that you instinctively know aren't going to add a lot to your painting. 

I often remind artists that they are the creator. They are the artist. And the artist gets to decide what’s included in their painting.

You are free to edit your scene. If there's a weird truck on a street scene or if there's an odd shaped building, if there's trees that you don't like or an oddly placed piece of furniture in your photo, just take it out of the scene. You don't have to paint the exact scene in the photo.

3. Rearrange as Needed.

Something that you need to know is there's never going to be the perfect scene - where everything is right where it should be, where the lighting is just right, and where the composition is exactly how you’d want it. 

What we are doing as artists is we are taking a scene and we are creating an impression of that scene.We are recreating that scene through our eyes, through our own vision. So if we want to rearrange things to make for better compositions, we can do that. 

There are always going to be adjustments that we make to create a better scene.

4. Look for Patterns to Simplify Complicated Areas.

This key is a little more abstract than the others, but let me try to explain it to you with an example. 

Say you're painting a scene and there's a lot of people sitting at a table. 

This is a lot of information. My first piece of advice is to look at the scene and squint at it. This helps you to see this complicated mess of information as a pattern. 

I'm not going to draw every person, every little detail, every chair, every table. What I'm going to do is just try to see what the pattern of light and shadow is and to really look at this area in terms of shape and value. If you can do that, you can start to recreate patterns of light and dark that make areas like this in your scenes more paintable, and actually simplifying them in the way that you paint them. 

Whether it is a pattern of trees or complicated objects, if you can look at them as more patterns of light and dark and different shapes you can start to simplify areas that are more complicated in your paintings.

5. Paint "the Key."

The best way I can describe this is to say that if you have a figure that's a little more prominent, a little closer up to you, you want that figure to look more complete. But as you get further back into your scene and there's more people in the background, you want to paint those people more abstractly. 

So if you have a group of figures, paint one a little more polished, a little more put together, and the other ones in the background can be more abstract and more simple. The same thing goes for trees. When we paint a large mass of trees, students tend to try and paint all the texture that they see: all the leaves, all the branches, and we end up using so many brush strokes to tell one part of the story. This makes your painting appear overworked and entirely too busy.

Instead, minimize the texture on almost all of the trees, highlighting one tree that is more prominent with more texture and detail. When you do this, the rest of the trees read exactly like they should, even though you're not painting all that information. 

This is good news for you as a watercolor artist. You don't need to render every single figure or every single branch exactly. You can start to think more abstractly and think more about shapes after you learn to paint the key.

Next Week's Video

Next week I'm going to walk you through my process for painting this scene from Sicily.

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