
Painting transparent objects can seem like a contradiction of nature. How do you perceive something if it is clear and how do you paint it? The mental twist is that glass or plastic is never really completely clear. It will always have a bit of cool color, whether gray, blue, green, or lavender that distinguishes it from the surrounding atmosphere.
For an exercise in painting transparent objects in watercolor, I put together a collection of bottles filled with colored water. In front of the bottles I added a glass vase partially filled with clear water and an empty plastic mayonnaise jar. For the first step, I sketched the shapes of all the containers lightly in pencil. In the second step, I began to paint, blocking in all the colors generally, including the foreground and background. For the transparent objects in this exercise I used a very light gray blended from ultramarine blue and burnt umber.
I painted the objects with broken strokes, leaving the white of the paper unpainted to represent highlights. I also left white outlines unpainted around the containers to create the illusion of highlights on their outer edges. I blocked in the colors of the bottles, also leaving the highlights unpainted. Once I completely blocked in the foreground and background colors and allowed that layer to dry, I started adding some detail. Over the first paint layer, I used a fine brush and a darker gray to outline the forms of the clear vase and the jar. I used a broken outline based on observation and a dark line of varying thickness.
The edges of the water in the colored bottles called for a darker colored line, so I deepened my mixture of orange and pink with a touch of burnt sienna. I then went back into each form and carefully painted the abstract pattern of colors and shapes as I observed them. Then I painted the blue cast shadows on the foreground and some cast colored light that flowed through one of the bottles onto the foreground. I may go back and add some brighter color and sharper value contrasts, but this was a good beginning.
All content copyright 2010 by Susan Sternau
For an exercise in painting transparent objects in watercolor, I put together a collection of bottles filled with colored water. In front of the bottles I added a glass vase partially filled with clear water and an empty plastic mayonnaise jar. For the first step, I sketched the shapes of all the containers lightly in pencil. In the second step, I began to paint, blocking in all the colors generally, including the foreground and background. For the transparent objects in this exercise I used a very light gray blended from ultramarine blue and burnt umber.
I painted the objects with broken strokes, leaving the white of the paper unpainted to represent highlights. I also left white outlines unpainted around the containers to create the illusion of highlights on their outer edges. I blocked in the colors of the bottles, also leaving the highlights unpainted. Once I completely blocked in the foreground and background colors and allowed that layer to dry, I started adding some detail. Over the first paint layer, I used a fine brush and a darker gray to outline the forms of the clear vase and the jar. I used a broken outline based on observation and a dark line of varying thickness.
The edges of the water in the colored bottles called for a darker colored line, so I deepened my mixture of orange and pink with a touch of burnt sienna. I then went back into each form and carefully painted the abstract pattern of colors and shapes as I observed them. Then I painted the blue cast shadows on the foreground and some cast colored light that flowed through one of the bottles onto the foreground. I may go back and add some brighter color and sharper value contrasts, but this was a good beginning.
All content copyright 2010 by Susan Sternau









