Painting Water

Artist Joe Dowden Answers Your Queries About Capturing Water in the Tricky Medium of Watercolour.

What are some clever ways for approaching light reflections on the water’s surface in watercolour paint?

The first thing is, I don’t paint light, I paint dark. In fact I’m all about dark. I’ve had two eureka moments – one at a roadside brook and the other in a purpose built basement studio – that enabled me to make the leap from painting water to letting it paint itself. The first time, I noticed the paint had settled evenly in a wet wash below a dark-clad bank, and I just left it. The trick is to put it on once and leave it alone. That didn’t work every time, but the second eureka moment solved it. This was during a painting of the Kennet and Avon canal, away from the scene using reference material.

Much indecision about colour resulted in many deep rich pools of different colours on several palettes. Putting masses of wet colours in different places into the same wet wash and letting them blend produced fantastic deep reflections.

What basic palette should I be working with when painting water?

For deep blue sky reflections in the foreground I use Phthalo Blue mixed with a black or Payne’s Grey or Neutral Tint, or mixed with a graduated dark of Quinacridone Magenta, moving up through Burnt Sienna and then into a cleaner blue, with intense dark in the foreground.

For the woodland river reflections I use Cadmium Lemon, Phthalo Green, Burnt Sienna and an intense dark of Payne’s Grey or Neutral Tint. I steer clear of mixed darks of Ultramarine Blue, as these lack power and work against strong values. I sometimes use a lot of Naples Yellow, and I don’t mind saying I had to break a lot of rules to develop this palette.

I developed these methods by painting water on site. You can get away with: Cadmium Lemon, Phthalo Green, Burnt Sienna, Quinacridone Magenta, Payne’s Grey, Cobalt Blue and Ultramarine Blue.