Plums: Process Thoughts

Shaping a piece of art is a curious, personal thing unique to the time of its working. I want to share what I learned about myself as I created it.

First: I rarely do a piece where I know ahead of time how to do every part. It’s a self-challenge habit I use to accelerate learning.

Second: I don’t stick too closely to the subject. I’m not interested in realism, as much out of personal desire and taste as well as not having the time between bouts of illness to devote proper attention to a realistic style.

That approach doesn’t actually make painting easier, just difficult in a different way. I have to pile in with more individual decisions than otherwise. What do I emphasize and how do I portray it? When the solutions don’t cleave to reality the choices are harder to come up with.

So from the start, I use the oft-derided Winsor & Newton watercolor markers. I find that they work better on well-sized papers; it’s the presence of at least surface sizing that seems to matter most, as I even get good results from Strathmore Bristol without going all the way to Strathmore 400 series watercolor paper.

They fit my standard mode of painting: slap dense pigment on the paper and wash them out into shapes with a waterbrush. With water control you can have smooth washes or leave strokes behind as you wish.

I don’t do pencil undersketches anymore. Here I do an underpainting where I observe the subject and capture what I find interesting about it. In this case I really liked the turning, folding shapes of the leaves nestling around two contrasting plump fruits. And so I focused on a composition of leaves as graceful guests, and the plums as bold hosts who serve to complement the guests.

(Host and guests is a way of thinking about composition.)

The simple natural colors I used for the underpainting gave me a sense of what kind of warm tones might work. I wanted something where the guests were more subdued than the host. Thus I desaturated into warm greens the leaves, and increased the saturation of the plums.

At this point I contemplated the background. I could leave it the plain, natural white, but I wanted to make a more deliberate choice than that (even if I left the background out in the end).

But I’ve been experimenting with the color of gold, so after I finished the layers of watercolor markers I added a three-layer sundae of colored pencils to the background. Using multiple colors helps make areas of color more vibrant.

In the end, I liked the warming effect of the golden ochres, so I colored the background all in.

I thought about adding more detail to the leaves and plums. Deciding when to stop working on a piece is important. Here I felt I liked the simplicity, since I wanted to express the shapes rather than the detail of each one.