Here is a simple watercolor painting subject for beginners. It is also a good subject if you are sitting around your home and not feeling too inspired. It will get your creative juices flowing without a great deal of emotional investment on your part. I have a number of other similar simple watercolor paintings for beginners on this website which you may be interested in.
Simple watercolor painting subject – egg shells
This is a very good watercolor painting exercise which can also result in quite a nice work of art. I recently had my students paint egg shells as a class painting. While the subject can appear very basic it opens the eyes to such things as subtle reflected lights, cast shadows, form shadows, and composition.
A subject like this is very good when you are feeling stuck for a painting subject. It’s simplicity will mean you can get your drawing down quickly and get painting with your watercolors. It is a great subject for when you are feeling creatively blocked. You can treat it as an exercise rather than a full painting so you will not be so hesitant to start. After all, it only requires a little of your time and almost no cost. It generated a great deal of interest amongst my watercolor students. What at first just seemed a simple watercolor painting subject, turned out to be a lot more challenging. It is a watercolor painting for beginners but it can also be done by more experienced artists.
The first step in this painting, after collecting your egg shells, and finding a suitable bright spot light, is to arrange your composition in an interesting manner. Set up your spotlight to cast an interesting shadow pattern to aid your composition. I selected three pieces of egg shell with two touching and one a little apart from the others. The shells were placed so that there was a lot of variation in the spaces between and around them.
After lightly drawing up my composition I painted the egg shells with a wash of burnt sienna and French ultramarine. I made the mixture quite watery so that some of the paint beaded at the bottom of each egg. After I quickly painted the two connected eggs I let the paint sit there for about thirty seconds to give it time to stain the paper but not fully evaporate. I then paint their cast shadows. I used French Ultramarine mixed with a little Alizarin Crimson, this violet mixture leans to the blue. Notice that some of the egg color has bled into the shadow area, this acts as reflected light which you should notice in real life. This bleeding into the shadow color was done on purpose and is the reason to keep a bead of paint at the bottom of the egg shapes.
With the egg shell on the right I did not bleed any egg shell color into the shadow area as there was light shining through a gap in the egg shell on its left hand side. Sorry but you can’t see this in my image as it is out of the field of view.
After the egg shapes and shadows were totally dry I went back and painted each egg shape again with my previously mixed egg color. I also dropped in some soft edged form shadows with French Ultramarine and a little Alizarin Crimson.
I let this stage dry completely.
Next I re-wet the shadow areas and drop in some strong dark water color made up of French Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna. This goes just under each of the two egg shells on the left.
I used a weak wash of Yellow Ochre, Cobalt Blue, and some Burnt Sienna for the inside of each shell. I let this dry fully. The watercolor painting was finished with the addition of some shadow color to the inside of each egg shell. The one in the middle has a hard edged cast show which you can see in the finished painting above.
While this is a relatively simple watercolor painting subject it can be enhanced as much as you like to build it up to a full work of art.
