Ideally, you will have done a value sketch before you

start painting. That can help you make decisions about

emphasis, movement, focus and value before ever
putting paint to paper. I learned the importance of doing
these small value studies the hard way, by doing a lot of
really poor paintings when I first started out, and then
trying to figure out what went wrong after the fact.

Shown at top left is one of my first watercolors. Not much

is working in this painting - the yellow tree is placed
poorly and yet is the dominant color in the painting. The
entire painting suffers from too little paint (especially by
today’s standards for watercolor where paintings are
much more color saturated). Although you can sense the
wash running diagonally from lower right to behind the
yellow tree, it’s not very clear. Your eye jumps from the
foreground prickly pear to the yellow tree to the small
cluster of trees in the background, and has to do a visual
leap between each one.

What could be done to improve this painting besides

throwing it out and starting over again? Sometimes that’s
the only recourse, but my philosophy has always been
that once I’m to that point in a painting, I have nothing to
lose by experimenting, sometimes taking drastic mea-
sures, to see if I can make a bad painting better.

If you have computer skills, pull the image into your image editing program (like PhotoShop), make a new adjustment
layer, and then after selecting a shape with the lasso tool, adjust its value and/or color. Keep fooling with this shape until
you get enough contrast of value/color to move your eye through the painting, connect element visually and subdue
those parts that need it by decreasing contrast in those areas of the painting. You could also accomplish this same
process by getting a piece of matte acetate and laying it over your watercolor and test painting a wash shape to see how
it looks. Even if the drastic measures don’t succeed in making a masterpiece, you will have learned something about the
painting process, and that you can make corrections to watercolor. There is always more than one solution. Look at this
painting that a student did in a Tom Lynch workshop. The first image is the student’s work. The middle image is the
correction Tom made to the student’s painting (he used a cool wash pretty much all over the painting to give it a rainy
day feel. That works to tone down the strong dark band in the original painting that cut the painting horizontally, but it
isn’t the only solution. My corrections (scrubbing out color from that dark band, heightening sky color, anchoring the
distant mountain with a similar green value) works equally well, but retains more of the feel of the student’s original.

3
 When a Painting Doesn’t Work
Look carefully at your plan before you start
painting and continue to look carefully at your
painting as you work and at completion. Look
at it in a nearly dark room to see if your value
structure is reading. Check that each part of
the painting is working well, and if not, either
crop it or repaint it until the whole painting is
unified.

This is a 20 year old painting of mine that I

now know does not hang together. It feels like
two separate paintings (see the cropped
images below).

What could I do to fix this besides

cropping it and throwing out the left
half of the painting? I need to run the
dark of the foreground prickly pears
behind the lighter corner of the whiter
window shape and connect this dark
with the dark area in the upper left
corner of the painting. I will need to be
careful to keep this dark neutralized so
that it doesn’t compete with the bird
and flowers, and doesn’t contrast too
greatly with the white frame shape in
the center of the painting. The darker
value would also help anchor the more
stylized prickly pear on the left side of
the painting.

This is another painting from the same

time period, using a variation on the
imagery that focuses on the new
growth on the prickly pear. While this
painting feels more unified to me, there
are still some tweaks I would make if I
could get it back from the owner. Using
a graduated wash, I’d lower the con-
trast at the corners of the white frame
shape where it abuts the darker values.
That small tweak would help keep the
focus squarely on the close up of the
prickly pear, which is where I want it. I’d
also break up that large white area a
little more by repeating the stylized
plant in that area.

2
Strategies for Unity
Unity is what we hope to have achieved when we lay down our paintbrush and declare a painting “finished”. Unity is
achieved when all the parts of the painting work successfully. The major shapes, color and value patterns — what I call
the bones or underlying structure of the painting — make the most important contribution to unity. The little stuff —
brushwork, pigment qualities, textural effects, degree of realism and detail — are all things that people enjoy up close,
but they aren’t what grabs people’s attention from across the room and makes them want to take that closer look.

The elements and principles of design are all

related, but most of the time, that complexity
can be reduced by limiting your choices to one
or two elements and/or principles. In Frank
Benson’s Geese in Flight, he lets repetition
(the geese) dominate, but gives us enough
variety in the bird’s shapes, color, value and
detail to avoid monotony. He’s kept his colors
subdued. Finally, note how many places he
uses a V shape in his composition. That
repetition also contributes to the unity of the
painting.

In Judy Pollard’s painting, Tulips, (below), the

underlying structure of circles (in the barrel
top, the general mass of the flowers and in the
slightly lopsided ring formed by the tulip
blossoms), helps unify this painting. She also used value contrast, and color intensity contrast to focus our attention
particularly on the more yellow-orange tulip at the lower left. Note how much grayer the reds and oranges are in the
other blossoms, particularly the ones near the edges, and how neutralized the rest of her colors are.

Think of the art elements and art principles as blocks you use to
build your painting - you can pick and choose which of them to
choose and emphasize depending on the needs of the painting
and what you want to say about your subject. In Judy’s painting, I
think she emphasizes color, with contrast/variety and rhythm/
repetition/pattern. What do you think?

color proportion/scale
line dominance/subordination
texture rhythm/repetition/pattern
value movement/direction
shape contrast/variety
space balance

It doesn’t mean there aren’t other elements and principles at

work, just that some things are given more importance than
others, and that is what ultimately creates unity. Without some
conscious deci-