Free Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium by Tom Hoffmann

case lies in the assumption that the walls are white. For watercolor purposes, they are not white. If you were actually painting the walls, and not a picture of them, it is true that you would be dipping into a big can of white paint. This is the source of the confusion. Your brain is telling you the walls are white, but your eye knows that they are not the lightest shapes in the picture.
    In a watercolor, you cannot get any lighter than the white of the paper. It makes sense to reserve it for the lightest part of the scene, and darken everything else relative to that. If, as is the case in this hypothetical painting, the lightest parts were yellow and blue, you would probably want to apply a faint glaze of color over the white, which would darken it a little. This shifts thevalue scale for the entire painting. The walls must be made dark enough to make the fluorescent lights seem bright by comparison, but not so dark that they do not seem white, and so on, all the way up the scale to the darkest darks. How dark we make a shape in a watercolor is always a relative matter.
    What we “know” is firmly rooted in the language of meaning.Saying the words “old gray barn” calls forth a host of associations, somewhat different for each of us, but always evocative and persuasive. Our ideas about a subject can profoundly affect what we think we see. In the early stages of making a painting, I like to direct my questions to the abstract qualities of the image, to keep from being misled by meaning. There is plenty of time to check in later to make sure the story is being told, but for now, I want the simple, visual reality. When we are assessing value, it helps to use the language of pure form. It can be very difficult at first to ignore your insistent brain, but after a while it begins to feel like a vacation.
    Take a close look at the outbuildings in this photograph. Which is darker—the sunlit part of the “gray” barn, or the shadowed part of the “white” building? What we call something can create conflict between the brain and the eye.
    Seeing the two surfaces as shapes rather than buildings eliminates any confusion about their relative values. It also helps to squint.
    TOM HUGHES, LOW TIDE, STONINGTON, 2005
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
22 × 30 INCHES (56 × 76 CM)
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    Even though the light on the rocks in the foreground has not been left white, it appears brighter than the “white” boathouse. Proximity to much darker shapes makes the sunlit, upward-facing rock surfaces seem relatively brilliant. What do you think: Is the boathouse pure white paper?

    R ESERVING THE W HITES
    Let’s take a moment to talk about the white paper. With a transparent medium, light passes through the paint and bounces off the paper, back to the viewer’s eyes. As the source of light in a watercolor, therefore, the paper is very important, but it is not sacred. I definitely prefer paintings that allow the paper to remain visible through the paint, but this does not necessarily mean that pure white paper must be reserved. If there is nothing white in the picture, then there does not need to be any white paper.
    Students have told me they were taught that “If it doesn’t show some white paper, it’s not a watercolor.” Excuse me, but this is nonsense. Teachers tend to make proclamations, and some people take them as gospel. The words get passed along and rewritten a bit each time. I once overheard a student say, “Tom says that no one should ever take a drawing class.” Yikes! I wonder what else has been attributed to me over the years.
    I think it’s actually a bigger problem to leave too much white than not enough. Even in a scene with large light areas, saving the white paper for where it is really needed can increase the illusion of convincing light.
    It is unfortunately quite common to leave a little gap of white paper between shapes, partly as a dam to keep washes from merging, and partly just to produce some kind of sparkle. The