Avoid The Portal

Watercolour painting is full of traps, just waiting to trip us up. Of all the composition issues we’re faced with, my favourite, and the one that springs up unbidden time and time again is the visual coincidence. I’m talking about the painting equivalent of taking someone’s photograph, the result of which looks humourously like a tree is sprouting out from the top of their head… (we’ve all done it!)

Of all the ‘Coincidence-traps’ there is, one of the sneakiest is what I like to refer to as ‘The Portal’. Quite simply; if you have an object behind another; say, a building behind a tree, then make sure the edge of the building doesn’t line up exactly alongside the trunk of the tree. Having branches dangling from the tree, in front of the building, goes some way to reinforcing the notion that the tree is the closer object. After all; without such a visual clue, who’s to know? It could be a very small building (or an extremely large tree). If the building butts up exactly alongside the tree trunk, it can look like it’s glued to it; far better would be to have the building, even if only slightly, reappear from the other side of the tree.

An object disappearing behind a tree and not reappearing out from the other side looks like it might have slipped into a ‘portal’ to a parallel dimension – and we don’t want that!