Respecting Borders
When we paint a picture in watercolour, we’re restricted to the space beween four non-breakable barriers… the four borders of our paper.
Having made that statement; I’ve seen artists paint out, beyond those borders, onto the mounting card and even onto the frame, but that always seems to me to be a gimmick of limited appeal (or maybe I’m just a dinosaur when it comes to these matters).
The fact is, for most of us, the borders of the paper represent our painting limits. The reason I mention them is because they also represent potential problems for any composition. There are a couple of examples that I want to describe to you to illustrate what I’m drivelling on about, both are of different issues, yet both are influenced almost entirely by the paper border.
The first example is that of ‘scrunching down’ trees. I’ve often seen students compress a tree in order to fit it onto the paper, usually in one of the top corners. It’s a subconscious thing that we sometimes do; we have a wonderful tree and we want to show it all, yet squeezing it down can look very unnatural, almost certainly reducing its overall impact in the process. It would be far better to allow the tree to grow out, and disappear beyond those borders; it increases the implied stature of the tree, and reminds the viewer that they are looking at just a small section of something that is probably quite huge.
My second example is that of painting a tree trunk along the left-, or right-hand edge of the paper. Sometimes, when we take a photo, this just happens, but I would argue that by painting a tree parallel to the edge, it actually makes it look like it is attached to the edge. It isn’t, of course, but there is an unspoken implication that this might be the case, and some people just interpret exactly what they see… Another example I saw recently was of a bird someone had painted in the scene. There was nothing wrong with the bird at all, except for one tiny little thing; the tip of its outstretched wing touched the border of the paper. Again; the visual implication was that the bird was attached to the papers border somehow, and gave the bird an oddly static appearance. In both of these second examples, the problem would have been avoided if a gap had been left between the border and the object (the tree or the bird). The bird, with space around it would have looked like it was in flight, and the tree wouldn’t have looked like it was glued to the paper’s outer border.
In the case of a landscape, the border of the paper represents a window onto the world. We have to be careful not to draw too much attention to it for fear of inducing a sense of claustrophobia, but we should also take care how we select what to show and what not to show; the tease of the painting is to raise curiosity in the viewer and to draw them in…
