Watercolour tips – the easy way to design your painting

This tip is all about composition and design. It's not enough to just take a photograph and slavishly copy it, we need to use our skills as designers to create an interesting and effective composition which will turn our painting into a true work of art.

Easy way: The easiest way to try out various designs is by doing small pencil sketches first, concentrating on the positioning of the elements of the composition, and on the light and dark tones. To start with, here's a photograph on which I based the paintings of winter trees which I showed you in the Tackling Trees tip.

Now scroll down the page to the pencil sketch which I made as an aid to the design of those paintings. Comparing the sketch with the photograph of the scene, you can see that I've made changes both to the composition and to the lighting.

Simplify: I've simplified the trees and allowed the church to become the focal point of the painting. I've also enlarged the dark area of grasses on the right in the foreground, to encourage the eye towards the focal point.

In the original photo, it was a very dull day and there is no obvious source of light. Here I've used shading on the church to give a feeling of quite strong light coming in from the right. Lighting the church enables it's form to be much more easily seen. It has a round tower, a common feature in Norfolk, which is really not visible in the original photo. Use of graduated shading across the face of the tower gives an impression of roundness.

Light and dark: All the light and dark tones in the painting are indicated in this simple sketch. Nothing in nature has a line drawn round it, we see shapes by differences of tone, light against dark, so by trying out our tones before starting to paint we can easily see if the picture is going to work.

These sketches should be small, about postcard size, and done with a soft pencil, say a 4B, so that you can shade in. Do several of them if you like, until you find the ideal design for your painting. At this point the only remaining decisions will be about colour, everything else has been worked out at this stage.

For a tip on painting trees like these, click here.

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