Watercolor of Colored Glass

Glass Menagerie by Lorraine Watry ©2013

I started this painting as a demonstration for a class I was teaching this summer on painting glass in watercolor. I don't usually paint still-lifes but the reflections and detail in the glasses were exciting. I began by setting up and rearranging all the glass pieces that I collected for the class. Then I tried setting them up with different backgrounds both inside and outside to provide different lighting. I ended up choosing this scene because I liked the contrast that the wooden bird statues played against the blue bird and all the other glass. It also felt like there was a story.
     The next step was to block out all the highlights with masking fluid. It is better to save more whites in the beginning because you can always paint some of them out later. Then I started with the upper right corner and just started painting the shapes in the white glass bowl. Having strong contrasts and looking for all the little abstract shapes when painting glass is important.
     One of the changes I made from my photograph was to paint the little glass pieces around the blue bird red instead of the blue that they are in the photograph. I did this for two reasons. The first was that the red helped the blue bird stand out more and the second reason was to spread the red around the painting a little more.
     After finishing a painting, especially a busy one like this, it is important to look at it for a while to make sure there are no areas that need adjusting. I looked at my painting from across the room and in different light, I also looked at in reverse in a mirror and saw a few areas that I wanted to adjust. After making the adjustments, I removed the masking that had saved the white of the paper and painted in the areas that needed color. The rest of the masked areas were cleaned up by painting some of the surrounding color to make them look less cut out or I scrubbed some of their edges to soften them to look like highlights on the glasses, ex. as seen on the green goblet in the upper right hand corner.
     

Painting Clear Glass in Watercolor

Salt Shaker ©LWatry 2013

Many watercolor artists avoid painting clear glass in watercolor because they are unsure how to approach the subject. This is a painting I did as a demonstration for a class.

I chose a simple subject with three objects and a dark background. The salt shaker was clear, patterned glass and contained some salt. I purposefully tilted the salt to make the composition more interesting.

To paint clear glass you, like other glass, you need to look for the reflections and refractions that occur in the glass. The reflections in the salt shaker are things like the bright yellow on the lower left of the glass that occur due to the lemon. Refractions happen when something next to the glass or on the interior are bent, curved, or the color is changed due to the glass. In this painting the green of the pear can be seen through the glass, but it is distorted and the color is slightly brighter than the actual pear.

Painting glass is like working a puzzle, you paint or leave white, the small, usually abstract shapes that make up the whole. The metal lid of the salt shaker is another place to look for unusual reflected colors or highlights.

For the colors in a clear glass jar, don't just use grays, but look for other colors that might be reflected from surrounding objects or lighting. In the salt shaker I added yellow, green and blue to areas of the glass. Some of my grays are purple tinted or blue tinted to give them some variation. The whites of the shaker and salt are the white of the paper. The smaller lines were masked out to save them, then the masked removed and the white cleaned up by matching the paint around the white area . Some of the whites were scrubbed to soften them to give them the look of a reflection.

This Salt Shaker painting is available for sale on DPW. If you would like to bid in the auction, click the link here: My Auction at Daily Paint Works