http://www.painters-online.co.uk artistMarch 2020 21
PRACTICAL
categories: hard, soft, lost and found.
In all forms of painting hard or found
edges are created by placing one colour
or tone over or next to another; soft
edges are created by blending one
colour or tone with or into another, to
a greater or lesser extent. However, in
watercolour we have another type of
hard edge, particular to the medium,
where wet paint has dried and created
a slightly darker ring around the
outside edge of a mark. This happens
in watercolour because the paint
granules gravitate towards the edge
of the meniscus of the watermark as
it dries. This only really happens with
watercolour and some very liquid
inks when the component parts of the
medium are not consistent or stable
within the liquid. Lost and soft edges
can refer to areas, for example, when
the edge of a subject/object isn’t
visible – deliberately painted this way
to allow the brain, as it were, to enjoy
completing the picture.
To summarise therefore, lost,
found, hard and soft edges appear in
watercolour and can be used to create
the illusion of distance, depth and to
direct the eye towards a focal point or
centre of interest.
As distance increases not only do
we lose the colour yellow and then
red from our visual ield (the ability
to see these colours decreases, which
is why distance appears more grey,
towards the blue side of the colour
wheel), but we also lose the ability
to see detail, edges become visually
soft, they blur and are eventually lost,
until we are left with softer whole
shapes. So in watercolour, being able
to use a vocabulary of lost-and-found/
hard-and-soft edge techniques gives
us the ability to create the illusion, on
a two-dimensional surface, of a three-
dimensional world – the way we see it!Techniques
Hard or found edges appear in
watercolour simply by applying paint to
dry paper and allowing them to dry. Soft
or lost edges in their simplest form are
created by using a wet-in-wet approach,
but here they are simply suggestive and
lack structure. Therefore in this article I
am focusing on techniques you can use
that follow two strands:- Creating a hard or found edge, then
softening or losing it to suggest the
natural blurring of distance. - Creating different types of soft or
lost edges that create depth in a three-
dimensional world. - Softening or losing a hard edge to
create distance.
To create whole, retained, distant
shapes that have lost detail, we need to
irst paint the shape and then lose it. I do
this by painting the structure in as much
detail as I can see naturally and allowing
it to dry, taking care to use the best match
for colour and tone. Once dry I tilt my
painting and wash the surface with clean
water, allowing the water to progress
downwards. This softens and washes
away the darker ring around the outside
edge of the marks. You can see how this
has been done with each headland in
the detail shot of Guillemots, Sea Beet and
Tree Mallow (left and below): I matched
colour and tone until I arrived at
foreground structures that would keep
their hard edges. Only then did I paint
the sky over the whole area, essentially
dropping all of the cliffs back behind a
grey/violet glaze.
The detail from From The Eye (page
23) illustrates a similar use of washing
out of hard edges – almost completely
as the view disappears into the sun –
using a wide range of tones to exploit
the contrast and thus creating almost
ininite distance.Creating lost or soft edges
that suggest structured depth
In the painting From The Eye I (pages 22–
23) I created depth using soft edges at
the point where the Thames meets the
embankment on the left. We don’t see
a line where the water meets the wall
below the trees, neither do we see hard
edges to the relections in the water of
the towers, trees or walls above. These
soft edges were created by applying
the darkest shadow colour to where
the edge ‘should’ be with the board
tilted and then quickly running that
colour both up down with a large brush
loaded with clean water, to mirror the
structure above. As the board is tilted
the softened edge will have more of a
downward drag of colour, with minimal
paint travelling upwards, against gravity.
The fact that we don’t see an edge as
such allows the brain to complete the
picture and understand what is going
on. Here we allow painting what we see
without revision to override what we
know about the structure, that watert Guillemots, Sea Beet and Tree Mallow,
watercolour, 30 3 45½in (76 3 116cm)
q Guillemots, Sea Beet and Tree Mallow, detail