Tag Archives: watercolour

Today I painted a car! Part 2.

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Ford Mustang water-colour by Jon Tremlett ©2014

Well, here it is, the finished Mustang picture I’ve been working on over the last week. A slightly more intense painting session took hold yesterday and before I knew it I was sat staring at a completed picture. It would be fair to say I’m more than happy with it given that it’s not a subject I visit very often. I’ve never been a car fan, so they don’t appear on the radar as great subjects unless they are extraordinary, and even then I pretty much have to force myself to draw them. Just one of those things I suppose. Anyway, the main stimulus for doing this one was that it’s going to be a gift for a friend so that helps to keep the focus and the enthusiasm up at a level where you need it to make a decent job of it.

There is very much a kind of groove that one gets into when doing something like this. At the beginning of the session things are all rather laboured, small decisions about colour tone, wash density, which bit to do next and even which brush to use seem to take forever. but slowly things speed up and it’s all relatively easy to jump from one thing to the other. It must be a confidence thing too. After painting for an hour or so it all starts to feel more natural and intuitive, and this is really evident in ones ability to push concerns about mucking something up to one side and just get on with it. One gets into a flow which certainly doesn’t happen when trying to complete a picture by picking up the brushes for a few minutes here and there. Best to reserve some quality time and get stuck in.

There were some bits that I found quite difficult. For example the bush or hedge that sits behind the car and the way it’s reflected in the bodywork and windshield. In my reference photo the hedge is much larger but I wanted to reduce it’s presence and use it to help frame the car and give more prominence to the big bulbous hood. I’ve never been good at vegetation so this was a bit of a challenge but great practice for future projects. The other bits that presented a challenge were the headlamps. the lenses are a mass of prismatic forms and they are filled with so many reflections I found it quite hard to see what I was doing and replicate them in a believable way. Thankfully they aren’t too prominent in the overall scheme of things so my rather bitty interpretation of them isn’t to jarring. Again, all good practice for the future. I hope you like the final result as much as I do, and thanks for stopping by and reading todays post.

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Today I painted a car! Part 1.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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A painting in progress by Jon Tremlett ©2014

It would be fantastic to say that after only a day of painting that the picture was complete, but I know I don’t work that fast and besides, any faster would be a rush and that’s when mistakes happen. Anyway, as you can see from the shot above it has come a long way from the blue sketch shown in the last post. I suppose at this point the car is about half done.

Barring a couple of small detail changes it was very straightforward to trace off on to the watercolour paper using the lightbox. I use a good old HB pencil for tracing off, and I’ve found that once you’ve captured the image you can then stretch the paper as you would normally and not loose any of the pencil work. This is a really handy discovery and means I can avoid endless hours mucking about with grids and such transferring the drawing on to paper stuck to a big wooden board.

All of us who have been lucky enough to have been on the receiving end of any artistic tuition will have been told at some point or other that there is no such thing as black when making a drawing or a painting. So the first challenge when rendering a black car is working out what colour it is. An old tutor I had at design school always recommended starting with Payne’s Grey and working from there. He’s been proved right so many times. So the picture is built up using various dilutions of Winsor and Newton Payne’s Grey, wash upon wash. This means you can work slowly toward the shade you’re after without putting down a whole load, and subsequently realising it should have been lighter. It’s time consuming, but a lovely technique. To get the slight blueness in the highlights I put a very thin wash of Indigo Blue down first. The bits that look black, but are in fact an intense dark blue, were put down quite thick as those areas had very defined lines to follow. For the area of shadow under the car I’m going to use a half and half mix of W&N Payne’s Grey and Schmincke Payne’s Grey which will give me a slightly warmer shade. I’ll mention here that although I have three tubes of paint here all called Payne’s Grey, from different manufacturers, they are all quite different. It helps to buy a few and find the one that suits your technique the best.

The background contains the concrete telegraph pole shown, and a whole swathe of a large green leafed hedge that sits behind the car in my reference shot. There’s a big tree in there as well so they will go in towards the end of the painting process so that I can build them up gradually and frame the car just enough without swamping it. It’ll be done soon.

Shotgun drag bike – the finished picture.

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107_Shotgun©JonTremlett2014

Now that the finished picture is finally with its new owner, it’s the right time to post it here on the blog. It would have been unfair on Nik to put the finished picture up before he’d had a chance to see it in the flesh. Needless to say he had a very big smile on his face when he unwrapped the parcel, a moment that gave me great satisfaction and a fitting end to a project that has been utterly enjoyable to do, and has left me feeling that this could very well be the best picture I’ve done to date. So brilliant to get something just right. I think he’s going to hang it in his living room which makes me very proud and is rather flattering to be honest.

The front fairing was, in time honoured tradition, pretty much the trickiest part to complete in colour. As I hinted in the previous post, these intense liquid colours come with their own set of particular limitations, namely their ability to “blend” across larger areas and around complex details. Getting the red to “flow” around all of the lettering involved lots of quick brush work, letting things dry and using very diluted tints laid over each other. It took quite some time, but the result looks great in the context of the overall picture. We’d agreed that the bike would sit alone on the background and so the finishing touch was just to put the thick black line under the wheels and sign it. Job done.

108_Shotgun_B&W©JonTremlett2014

Nik had also asked me to do him a smaller black and white drawing that he could use for t-shirts and cards. I chose a simple elevational view for this one, and the dot shading technique I’ve used on a couple of previous pictures seemed the best way to go. As I’ve said before, this is a rather time consuming way to apply shade to a drawing but it does give the finished thing a look which is very distinct and crisp.

With these two done it’s time to delve into the unfinished projects drawer and pull out a couple of sketches that have been on the back burner for some time now. There’s also the possibility that I’ll do another picture of the Shotgun, perhaps a partial drawing from another angle. I’m undecided at present but will post up how I get on with both of these options soon.