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Part Part Part Part 5

create distinctive foliage

with just a few marks

WatercolourWatercolourWatercolourWatercolour

Fast and Loose

“Jack Merriott was never without a sketchbook and meticulously filled hundreds of these throughout his life.”

“His favourite and most frequent approach was to work in an entirely free and loose way, intermingling tinted washes and covering the paper without any previous pencil lines being drawn.”

Jack Merriott was a master at painting distinctive foliage with just a few brush marks. Take a look at his paintings on these pages and see how he has clearly produced the different textures of grass, trees, ferns and flowers with the simplest of brush strokes. This is what we will try to learn in this section of the course.

This probably explains why he was able to paint all sorts of foliage and was able to capture the essence of each specific type of plant with just a few well placed strokes. He observed accurately and by drawing often he learnt how to distil the very nature of the plant species into just a few shapes.

Look at the detail above from the painting Morning on the Common. These calligraphic marks – just a few dabbed lines placed in a row – give the impression of ferns or bracken on the woodland floor. In the detail (right) can you see how he has used a negative painting technique to show one fern frond light against a dark background (arrowed)? By negative painting I mean that he has painted around the fern with dark paint in order to show it up as a lighter area. He hasn’t painted the frond, but the negative space around it.

In this detail from the same painting he has used a round brush to loosely mark bunches of foliage on the tree – not individual leaves. There are areas of paler foliage and darker foliage, which give the impression of distance. The tip of the same brush has been used to paint in the branches. Note how some of the foliage looks as though it is floating in space and is not connected to a branch. This is a good thing to do and actually causes the viewer to interact with the painting and to fill in the gaps.

Now watch the video, read the following instructions, and then have a go yourself at painting this scene Morning on the Common.

Watch me paint this picture on the accompanying video

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Tips: When you paint the following picture:

1. Work quickly and keep the brushwork lively. Try to complete the picture in under 45 minutes. 2. Don’t worry about making your painting exactly the same as his (or mine). Go with the flow and make the

painting yours!

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Morning on the Common by Jack Merriott

Step 1. Draw the bare minimum of lines to help you find your way onto a sheet of watercolour paper 15” x 22” (38cm x 56cm). Then use a large round brush and plenty of wet paint to wash on a pale cerulean blue for the sky (letting some come into the foreground as well), and add in a pale raw sienna wet-in-wet. Before these washes dry, add some stronger burnt sienna into the foreground in a few places to darken it.

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Step 2. Now mix a slightly stronger cerulean blue/raw sienna mixture and paint in the background foliage starting at the top left. Vary this colour by adding in a little more raw sienna or burnt sienna as you go along, painting down the tree trunk. Use more browny colours for the medium tones on the forest floor and then paint the right hand tree making this a little bluer. What is happening here is aerial perspective, using the fact that blue colours tend to recede and warm browny-reds tend to come forward. So the forest floor looks nearer to us that the bluer distant foliage. Add in some medium toned burnt sienna for the details on the ground and use the fine tip of the brush to pull out some fine fronds.

Step 3. Mix a darker grey-green with ultramarine blue/cerulean blue/burnt sienna and use this to add the next layer of tone. Paint very quickly using one colour of paint, one large brush and plenty of varied brush strokes. Once again, create the character of the ferns on the woodland floor by pulling out a few lines with the tip of the brush.

Step 4. Now mix an even darker grey-green and paint in the really dark darks to finish the painting. Finally stand back and assess if you need to add anything anywhere, and if so do it with care and be careful not to overdo it!

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The Old Sheep Bridge, Pulborough by Jack Merriott Here’s another painting by Jack Merriott with a different style of foliage. I love the way the foreground grasses are blowing in the breeze against the dark underside of the arch. These have been created by painting around the grasses with a dark background colour.

This detail (left) shows the drybrush technique used on the distant trees. The detail (right) shows how the grasses were painted. There’s a very pale first wash (1), with three other colours added carefully on top (2,3,4), then painted negatively with the dark under the bridge(5).

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Either have a go at copying this painting or work directly from the photo below of Watendlath Bridge in Cumbria, UK which has a similar composition.

“He tried to use his brush in as economical a fashion as possible. The greater area of his pictures was painted in one wash and, at the most, two or three applications in some parts of it. This resulted in paintings that were clean, pure and spontaneous.”

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Shadow Tracery over Arun Valley by Jack Merriott

Once again Jack Merriott has used the negative painting technique to show the white flowers against a dark background (detail left). The grasses have been added dark on light with the point of a brush (detail centre). The distant trees are just blobs of dark paint, but see how they are so carefully observed and perfectly drawn (detail right).

All quotes and paintings from the book Watercolour Impressionists. Author: Ron Ranson,1989 Publishers: David & Charles with grateful acknowledgement to the publishers.