(I wish readers a happy new year and a prosperous Year of the Dragon!) ）

The clouds painted by Gu Weijing this time have both, and the former is the mainstay, so he pays more attention to the practice of brushwork.

He dipped the tip of his brush in a little water.

The box of Rembrandt's master watercolor paint in Mr. Wattel's studio had only just been opened.

Watch as the cobalt blue solid pigment in the box like little hard candy is melted away on the palette little by little.

Very decompressing.

After a long time of painting, these solid pigments, especially the light-colored pigments that are white and yellowish, may not be decompressed after they are stained by the brush.

That's why Miss Mona has to take care of all kinds of paint boxes and palettes very carefully every time she finishes painting, and clean them up spotlessly.

The dirty part should be wet with a small watering can like an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and then gently wiped off.

Every piece of paint and palette must be cleaned up, fresh and lovely.

Or simply switch to a faster-consuming tubular pigment for this purpose.

Gu Weijing does not have this habit.

He is sloppy and certainly not sloppy.

Gu Weijing also takes painting very seriously.

It's not like some of the gruff students who run out of the palette and don't wash it, and when you take a watercolor class a week later, you can take the solidified and clumped paint off the palette with your fingernails, rinse it and use it again.

But there is no such paranoia that girls treat maintenance of painting tools as they do about maintaining beautiful dolls.

No matter how dirty the solid pigment is, it will always only dirty the surface.

The next time you draw, just dip the tip of the pen into it.

He thought casually, and the large brushes stained with paint brushed a large area on the canvas.

Draw clouds.

You definitely need to draw the sky background first.

And draw the sky.

The first thing you need to do is draw the sun.

In all works with the theme of the day, the sun is everywhere.

There is almost no pure blue and white sky in oil paintings and watercolors, and Dulwich teachers have repeatedly emphasized when they talked about the principles of painting in the past - one can not paint the sun at all, but must have the sun on the picture.

This is to emphasize the need for changes in light to be reflected in the work.

Literary rhetoric often uses the phrase "the sky is blue like a royal blue precious brocade".

But in the art world, the sky can never be smooth and flawless.

At the very least, it should not be a precious satin.

The precious silk is uniformly dyed from head to toe, and many Impressionist masters will instead pursue the feeling of dyeing the sky and the sun fragmented.

When painting.

The printer is like a mechanical uniform spray color, it loses its natural agility and falls into the inferior.

It doesn't matter if the sun hangs on your painting or not.

Whether there is a color change or not is important.

It can be sunrise in the east before the sea is exposed, it can be sunset in the west, it can be below the mountain line, it can be cloudy and rainy, or it can happen to be a cloud that just covers the scorching sun......

All in all.

You can have 10,000 reasons not to show the sun exactly on the canvas, in fact, the sun itself is not easy to paint.

Canvas, watercolor paper is not an LED display capable of excitation brightness of more than 1200 nits.

Due to the physical properties, the maximum contrast between light and dark can be limited to a certain range.

It is difficult for a painter to depict the dazzling sensation of the sun on canvas.

Everyone prefers to half-cover and half-hide the shy dew, depicting the layered expression of the sun through a veil.

Excellent works can freeze time, but also solidify nature.

Viewers should be able to take a casual look at your work and see what time of day the scenery is picked up by the wind, season and weather.

Even the humidity of the air can be expressed by a delicate painter in the form of clouds.

Sunlight is generally simple to express.

From early morning to dusk, the light changes and follows the same principle – the sun is the only source of light.

The color of the sky is always centered on it.

From moving away from the sun to approaching the sun, it fades from cool to warm.

As long as this is grasped, the sunlight will not feel unnatural to the audience.

And the existence of such a simple principle actually reduces the difficulty of painting.

The performance of moonlight is more complex and subtle than that of daylight, whether it is a bright lonely moon white, or a cold soak to dissolve the moon, how to express it belongs to the need to consider again and again, very spiritual work.

Even the moonlight and the stars have no night sky, which is a more complex field.

There is no fundamental principle.

The painting is not good, throwing a dead black curtain can also be said to be night.

However, a good painter can also paint the gradation changes under the influence of a variety of complex light sources under limited dark light conditions.

For example, Van Gogh's "Open-Air Cafe at Night" uses light as a light source.

Another example is the female painter Carroll's "Old Church on a Thunderstorm Day", which is a very fluid and colorful thundercloud on a rainy night.

After the advanced training of copying the old church.

Gu Weijing now shows the agility of the daytime canopy, which is also handy, and in addition, he has practiced watercolor for several days in a row.

"Let gravity work its magic."

The secret of watercolor flattening is always to let gravity and water do the work, not the painter.

Gu Weijing uses a large brush to dip each brush in a very thin and light pigment.

The action is swift and decisive.

In order to pull out the long, wide strokes, he doesn't even mind letting the strokes go beyond the borders that are fixed by the tape.

Professor Wattle often openly discriminates in his lectures, satirizing oil painters as old-fashioned stuccomakers.

If you look only at flat coating.

In Gu Weijing's personal experience, watercolor is much more like a stucco painter than the meticulous and elaborate impressionist copying of brushwork.

Sometimes, however, the principle of painting is so simple and crude.

There are not so many bells and whistles.

One shun breaks ten thousand laws.

The natural flow of paint that you pull out in one second with a large brush stroke is more brilliant and vivid than the lines that you think are delicate in 20 times the time you draw with a small pencil.

Bravely doing subtraction in the technique is also another way to add luster to the picture effect.

The time taken in the photo is more akin to the morning.

The position of the sun is low, and the color change in the sky is very intense.

When Gu Weijing composed the picture, he split the color of the sky from top to bottom, from cold to warm, into three main colors.

The top layer is a dark cobalt blue.

By the middle two-thirds, the largest color has become permanent rose.

The closer you get to the sun below, the brighter the color becomes.

The lowest level of the painting.

The sunlight has changed to a bright yellow Indian yellow...... In the photo, the water vapor is heavier, and the clouds are thicker and lower.

Therefore, Gu Weijing judged that it has not yet reached the point of using a more saturated degree of tartrazine.

The smudged canopy is only the background of the lowest layer of the painting.

If you don't think it's bright enough, after all the main scenes have been painted, simply add a few strokes of lemon yellow to the sun's area and the highlights of the clouds, and you're done.

Flatten the canopy.

Gu Weijing opened the system panel and found that the watercolor experience value had changed to [Lv.3 Semi-Professional (956/1000)].

Gu Weijing tilted his head with a smile.

On the one hand, it is because of the approaching bottleneck period, and on the other hand, the flat coating method is too basic for him.

The XP on the board has only increased slightly.

"The experience points have been increased by 5 points, which is good."

His state of mind is much better now than when he used to draw wisteria flowers, and he has a calm breath, and he realizes that the process of painting itself is more important than the increase in experience points on the panel.

He just glanced at it casually and turned off the panel.

After taking two sips of water, I figured out the next composition and brushwork in my mind, and then took a copy of the thick book "How to Make Watercolor Painting to the Extreme" by the Japanese watercolor master Terumi Suzuki that Professor Wattel had placed on the table, and continued to flip through it from the last time I saw it.

Wait until that layer of canopy paint is dry enough to paint on it.

So he washed the pen again and dipped it in paint.

Continue to draw the clouds on the underlying paint.

The general hue of the clouds is the same as the background of the sky, the main difference being that with a layer of clouds, the colors used are grayer and darker than the background.

Gu Weijing used cobalt blue and raw ochre to adjust the grayish color.

After rubbing it twice on the palette to see how it felt, it felt dark again, so I added a little more blue paint to refine the coldness of the color.

Compared to the sky.

This time, Gu Weijing brought out a more viscous and oily color, and the water content was lower.

The pigment is viscous.

The penmanship is dry.

It's still very clean, and the edges of the cloud folds are pulled out with a brush.

When drawing such delicate borders, you can use a flat-tipped brush or a round-tipped brush with an artificial brush, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Wattle actually recommends using a flat-tipped brush similar to an oil brush.

Round-tipped brushes are more delicate and obedient, but there is a disadvantage that because of the brush configuration, the release of water from round brushes is much more difficult to control than that of flat-tipped brushes.

Although this type of brush has the largest range of use and can show the most delicate color effect, many painters and art students are afraid of it.

Gu Weijing uses almost the same brush as Tong Zigong, and the way the two hold the pen is slightly different.

But Gu Weijing still prefers to use a round-tipped pen.

On the difficulty of control.

No matter how good the water absorption performance of watercolor paper is, it is still not on the same level as the raw rice paper, which has almost no water droplet flow effect.

He used it as the base edge of the cloud, and began to use it as a boundary, smearing upwards.

Gu Weijing's movements slowed down.

Blending clouds is a delicate job, and with the level of semi-professional skills, there is still a certain sense of blockage when painting.

This is a unique painting technique of watercolor, which is not available in either oil painting or Chinese painting.

The latter two are paints, only watercolor becomes flow paint.

Gu Weijing is now washing the brush in his hand, and it is not stained with any color.

Only clear water.

Watercolor paint can flow upwards as well as downwards from high to low.

Seems a bit counterintuitive.

The principle is that the pigment will diffuse in the water, so it can spontaneously flow from the lower water content and drier areas to the wetter areas before solidification.

Through this principle, we can skillfully draw the thickest and most solid clouds at the bottom as seen by the human eye, and the higher you go, the softer and fluffier it is, the more like the effect of a thin layer of light mist.

He painted slowly, feeling the spread of paint at the end of the brush.

Gu Weijing is not in a hurry.

The goal he set for himself today was not to increase his watercolor experience points, but to ask himself to do his best to draw a cloud.

Sand, sand, sand

……

Minutes and seconds passed.

In the quiet of the office, only the barely detectable sound of brushes falling on watercolor paper could be heard, and the slight noise on the playing field coming from far away.

Gu Weijing's painting was not very good at the beginning, and for some reason, the clouds he blurred out were a little restless.

It's not the restlessness of the flowing thunderstorm of "The Old Church on a Thunderstorm".

It's just that the picture is a bit dirty and messy.

The clouds were not as fluffy and natural as he had hoped.

Gradually, he slowly combined the brushes in his hands with the theoretical knowledge he mastered, and figured out some flavors.

"Muscle memory is wrong."

He was too accustomed to painting oil paintings and Chinese paintings.

It is undeniable that this has helped him improve his watercolor skills rapidly in the past few days, and Gu Weijing has gained a lot.

But at the same time, it brings drawbacks.

He still followed some of the old muscular sensations, and failed to fully bring out the strengths and properties of watercolor.

Gu Weijing's blending is still to put the brush into the old line, and "scoop" the paint out with a brush, rather than letting the paint flow out naturally.

That's why he made the clouds very mottled.

The essence of the blending method is similar to that of the flat painting, which is still the natural flow of pigment.

Rather than painting and coloring like an oil painting, his brushstrokes create a channel through which the colors flow naturally along the water trails and wetness.

Regardless of the direction of the strokes, the pigments move from thick to light, from dry to high moisture.

He wanted to manipulate the paint so much that the effect of the blending became very deliberate.

Not flat and fluffy enough.

"Painting skills are like heart, go with the flow."

Gu Weijing told himself in his heart.

He controls the side edge of the pen end and the place where the dry paint touches and gently smears the water, so as not to let the handwriting penetrate too much into the "underside" of the cloud.

Brush the edges of the brush and the edges of the paint.

Draw slowly, stroke by stroke.

The marks of each stroke are pressed against the edge of the previous stroke, guiding the paint farther and diluting it more lightly.

[Watercolor XP +7!] 】

[Watercolor XP +12!] 】

[Watercolor XP +9!] 】

……

Gu Weijing felt the improvement of his technique, like a pigment that had melted in water, and the stagnation of the tip of the pen also dissipated slightly.

He didn't deliberately open the system panel to distract himself from this.

Continue to draw clouds with peace of mind.

Finally.

As he finished a few stratus clouds above and in the middle of the canopy, he began to concentrate on sketching the lower, brightest, closest to the clouds in which the Sun was located.

Gu Weijing heard a completely different prompt sound from the system in his ears.

[Watercolor XP +3!] 】

[Congratulations, your watercolor level has been increased.] 】

[Current Watercolor Level: Lv.4 Class Painter: 1st Order (1/5000)]

(End of chapter)