I'm Getting Serious About Putting People in my Sketches

If you search Google Images for "populating landscapes", my old post from this blog may be the first picture you see.

Here is the link.

I still think that first effort wasn't terrible, but the fact is I never got around to actually putting people in my sketches!

Now that I'm getting excited about travelling again, I have promised myself that there will be people in my paintings and that they will be better than those awkward efforts.

Well, it turns out that all kinds of artists want to teach me how to do it.

My favourite art teacher these days is a very friendly young French lady named Anne Laure who has a wonderful YouTube channel full of enthusiastic tutorials. It's called Following the White Rabbit.

She just happened to have a tutorial entirely dedicated to my need of the moment, so I watched it and copied her examples as well as I could. These are the three resulting pages:

First Page

Second Page

Third Page

I hope you will agree with me that my best effort is the group on the second page! 

This is very encouraging and I will continue to practise.

In one of her other videos, Anne Laure recommends the tutorials put out by Trevor Waugh. I had never heard of him but I watched two of them and I was so impressed that I ordered his book.

It's called People in Watercolor and I found it on amazon.ca for a mere $15.72, including shipping.

Meanwhile, I will watch his two tutorials again and paint along with him, as I did with Following the White Rabbit. I may post my sketches... if they're not too embarrassing!

I also still think Halifax painter Ron Hazell is one of the best landscape populators ever and I have downloaded several of his paintings to use in my people practise.

This is my favourite:

Copyright Ron Hazell

The hardest part about all this, it seems to me, is finding a style that fits in with the rest of your picture. For instance, I know I will never paint such slick work as Ron Hazell. His work is so refined I won't have enough of a lifetime to achieve it - and besides, I'm not sure I want to.

Though I like their people, some of the male painters have a bold style that I'm not aiming for either. That's why I'm looking at so many examples by female painters. Some of them will be Amanda Brett and Fiona Peart, whose videos popped up on YouTube as I watched other artists' tutorials.

No, this is not the end of the people journey - it's more like the beginning.

Stay tuned!

Upcoming Ron Hazell Watercolour Workshop in Nova Scotia

 

I'll be taking a watercolour landscape workshop from Ron Hazell, the artist who created this beautiful painting, this coming May (2011). I'm looking forward to it!

You can see more of his work at his website: http://www.ronhazell.com/

Copying the Masters

From Ron Hazell's "A Summer Morning" - Watercolour on paper, 9" x 12"

In art, the tradition of copying the masters goes back very far; I wouldn't be surprised if there was never a time when it didn't exist.

So I hope that if Mr. Hazell ever sees this, that he will feel flattered, and not accuse me of copyright infringement!

I chose this painting because I loved the colours, and because it contained some puddles and Mr. Hazell is a master at painting them. (I discovered my passion for puddles when I lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where my favourite painter, Dan Rueffert, was rather famous for putting puddles in most of his paintings. I googled him today and found that he's very much alive and painting, but not so many puddles any more. Click here if you want to see one of his recent puddles.)

I admire Ron Hazell very much. I'm glad he lives only a few hours away, in Halifax, because I hope to take one of his workshops next spring.

A few weeks ago, I purchased one of his DVDs; I'm sure that watching it helped me paint this copy though I resisted the temptation to put it on while I was doing the actual painting.

It's not a perfect copy -- it wasn't meant to be, but what I like about it is that I was able to capture the light, the strong light that appears to emerge from the street between the first and second buildings on the left and to flood the sidewalk and the big gateposts on the right, and to bleach out the leaves of the big tree.

I also like how the blue buildings fade out gradually, creating the necessary depth.

My puddles are only so-so, while Ron Hazell's are little works of art in themselves.

I should have reviewed his puddle demonstration before painting them!

Populating Landscapes

I don't remember where I first saw the expression "populating landscapes", but it seems to describe very well the action of adding human figures to a landscape as a sort of "accessory" -- as opposed to a person or persons being the main feature or the main focus of the painting.

The only problem with that idea was that I had no clue how to achieve the kind of simplified, stylized, faceless figures that I was seeing in the kind of watercolour paintings that I like: from Ron Hazell to Alvaro Castagnet, and everyone in-between.

Each artist has his or her own formula for rendering people, and that includes Bob Davies, the author or the Watercolour Secrets DVD course that I've just bought. He starts out with a small circle on top of an upside-down cone which he fills out with clothing, and that's about it. It's effective enough.

On Saturday, I took out a quarter sheet of 200-lb paper, inserted the Figures DVD into the laptop, and followed Bob's directions. These are my first attempts at the basic male and female figure:

After a few hours,  I could see a definite improvement.

Sunday morning, I turned the sheet around and continued with the exercises on the DVD. First a family, then a cyclist, and finally a couple in love. Here are my results:

As you can see, I made a few corrections with gouache on the shoulders of the man on the left -- my guys' shoulders always seem to end up too wide -- and to the handlebars of the bicycle. But the couple on the right turned out pretty good right away, even the dog. I did deviate from Bob's example by putting the man's arm on the woman's back.

Speaking of Ron Hazell, he does his people quite differently, more like two cones: one for the top and an inverted one for the bottom.

For my last figure, I copied one of his women. If you look at his gallery, she's in A Summer Morning (No. 3). I think I did pretty well.

I took this sheet to the class on Wednesday, and everyone seemed to like my little figures.

I'm almost ready to start populating my landscapes.