How to Paint a Lighthouse With Watercolors
Painting directly from a subject is nothing new. Artists have been doing it for centuries. The best way to paint your picture of a lighthouse is to bring your equipment and watercolor paper to the site of a scenic lighthouse. You'll get much more out of it than if you work indoors using a photograph as reference material. Your work will have more conviction and you will benefit from the details you can observe at the site.
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Things You'll Need
- Watercolors set, tubes or cakes
- Brushes
- Watercolor paper
- Board (for stretching paper)
- Staples or gummed tape
- Palette (to hold tube colors)
- Water container
- Easel
- Pencils
- Sketch pad
Instructions
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Soak and stretch your watercolor paper. It's best to use handmade or mold-made papers for their durability and beauty rather than machine-made ones. For most subjects, 140-pound, cold-press papers (medium texture) are suitable. Submerge a sheet of paper in clean water for at least 15 minutes to give the paper time to absorb the water and expand. While the paper is still wet, staple or gum-tape the sheet around the edges to a flat board and allow it to dry. Once the paper is bone dry it will become taut and be ready for you to paint on it.
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Sketch the scene you intent to paint. Most of the time, some editing and rearranging of the scene's elements is necessary. Make small "thumbnail" pencil drawings of your scene to arrange the elements of your composition. Decide where in the picture your lighthouse will be placed, how large it will be and what the natural lighting conditions will look like (are there long afternoon shadows, or perhaps a bright noontime sun overhead?). Also choose what adjacent elements will be included in your composition (boats, seagulls, ocean waves, etc.).
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Isolate the area where you will place your lighthouse on your stretched watercolor paper with strips of masking tape. You may need to adjust the tape several times to find the correct angles for both vertical edges of the tall, silo-like structure. The masking tape serves as a guide and prevents washes of paint from running into the area where you want the sharp, crisp edges of the lighthouse building to stand out. Use facial tissues to mop up any excess paint that threatens to run into areas where you don't want it.
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Lightly sketch details of your seascape and lighthouse directly on your watercolor paper with pencil. You may choose to allow your pencil sketch to show once the painting is through, or you can eliminate the lines with a gum eraser. Begin to lightly fill in the shades of the background, leaving the white of the paper for areas that are going to be the lightest colors, such as whitecaps on ocean waves or reflected light on the water. Allow your thin washes to dry, then fill in any shadow areas with slightly darker colors.
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Gently remove any masking tape you've used to define the vertical edges of the lighthouse and carefully begin painting its textures, whether it's stone, concrete, wood or metal. Define the light itself, and include the intricacies of the lenses and metal fittings that make up the powerful beacon. Determine whether or not your lighthouse will cast a beam. This will determine how to paint the sky around it.
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Fill in the sky last, and leave a thin wash of color around the beacon's housing if you are planning to depict the lighthouse's lamp aglow. Lightly fill in clouds and sunlight if it is a daytime scene you're painting. Try turning your painting upside down while painting the sky and allow gravity to pull the pigment toward the top of the picture, This will give the illusion of a darker, bluer sky and this method will not leave brush strokes in your wash. Allow your painting to dry, and when you're satisfied with it, carefully remove it from the board. The paper will remain taut and flat and can then be matted and framed.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
