Short Time, Big Results

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. This is a small painting that I did as a demonstration in one of my classes at the Art Students League of Denver. I chose it because I wanted to show when you have a limited time to paint you can still work on several watercolor techniques with a small uncomplicated painting. This one took about 15 minutes. Here are some of the techniques that I worked on in no particular order.

I chose a complimentary color scheme of blue and orange. There are a few other colors, green and violet, but the emphasis is on blue and orange. The complimentary color scheme enabled me to use a limited palette. As you can see the main flower is orange and it is surrounded by different values of blue as well as the blue bottle. For the next technique, I added bits of color that would read as more flowers. This works because the orange flower is carefully defined so the viewer will assume the other shapes are also flowers. This created the loose technique that I was after.

By only including the top of the bottle, the emphasis remained on the flowers. I actually like this composition because it is a little different and I did not have to paint the entire bottle. You can see how the top of the bottle crowded the borders and created interesting negative shapes and the flowers also crowded the borders creating more interesting negative shapes. I was careful to make all the negative shapes different sizes so that they would be as interesting as the painted shapes. Here I was using the unpainted white paper effectively which is another watercolor technique.

For the next watercolor technique, lets look at edges. You can see a nice combination of hard, soft and blurred edges. To many hard edges and I loose the loose style and, to many soft edges, creates a painting out of focus. For the last technique, I created an "effect" by surrounding the bright orange flower with rich darks of blue and green. This makes the orange flower the dominate player.

To summarize, in this little painting I worked on: complimentary color scheme, limited palette, loose painting, effective use of white paper, interesting negative shapes, hard and soft edges, and creating an "effect" for a center of interest. A smaller, simpler painting allowed me to work on these different watercolor techniques in a short amount of time. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton