TIP: You can use chalk here to keep it non-committal at first.
Sketchbook Club: How to Paint a Whale
To help fill our days with creativity, we asked a group of our talented artist friends to share workshops, draw-alongs and more.
In this easy-to-follow painting tutorial, illustrator Jennie Maizels will help you recreate her beautiful mixed media whale at home.
You will need
An HB pencil
A set of acrylic paints
A set of watercolour paints
A set of gouache paints
Size 1 and 6 paintbrushes
A piece of white chalk or pastel
White gel pen (optional)
Step by step instructions
2. Then, transfer just the whale onto your page as per the instructions and draw in your wavy sea line. Then you are ready to add colour.
3. Start by painting in the sky a lovely thick aqua blue acrylic, as this will be a nice contrast to the blues of the watercolour whale.
4. Next, paint the sea a darker version of your aqua-blue sky. I did this by adding some dark green acrylic, making little pointy waves if you wish. We are using acrylics as they are plastic based, so make a wonderful surface for the gouache reeds, fish and splashes, as the pigments in the gouache don’t try to mix with the plastic acrylics.
5. Once the acrylics dry, start to paint the whale’s upper blue section. Do this by first making this area really wet, working fast so it doesn’t dry. Then drop intense blobs of blue pigment onto the wet surface. Let the watercolour really work it’s magic, the more blobby and watery the better.
6. Once it’s dried a tiny bit but not completely, try adding some more dots and blobs in darker colours, making sure the paint is really watery. Now, leave the whale alone and allow the watercolour to dry.
7. Whilst waiting for the whale to dry, you can paint in your reeds or corals at the bottom of the sea bed. Do this in two layers, starting with a darker (or lighter, whichever you prefer) and adding another contrasting layer once the paint is dry.
8. Add highlights using a much paler colour to add to the underwater feel.
9. Now you’re ready to paint the underbelly, do this in the same way as the blues but with pale warm dots, be careful to avoid the blue section, so the colours do not run.
10. Next, paint in your little shoal of fish by copying some of the fish on the reference sheet, pencil them in first and be sure to use a nice bright colours.
11. Now, paint in the whale’s waterspout and splashes and all the highlights on the waves. You can do this by using white gouache and a size 1 brush, or by using a white gel pen.
12. Now, making sure the paint is all dry, transfer the flying fish above the whale’s head. Then paint them using gouache paints and adding any details using a fine brush (or white gel pen).
13. Paint in the whale’s eyes and mouth, first in black and then highlighting in white, using either white paint or gel pen.
14. Finally, once you are sure everything is dry, add some shafts of light using a white chalk or a white chalky pastel, working in the rays with your finger and adding more where needed. Position the rays in a fan shape, making them sharper at the top and more smudgy further down.
15. For the finishing touches, you might like add a few white gel pen or fine painted dots and details.
How to paint a whale – materials:
- 90 x 70cm pre-primed stretched canvas, landscape orientation
- Large house painting brush (approximately 5cm across), for blocking in background colours.
- Synthetic flats in varying sizes for the detail, approximately 12mm, 7mm, 4mm.
- A larg-ish fan brush to make some swirly suds
Atelier Interactive Artists Acrylics:
- Titanium White
- French Ultramarine Blue
- Pthalo Blue
- Cadmium Yellow Light
- Burnt Umber
How to paint a whale – the beginning
This painting will be a bit different. People like structure, but in this tutorial we’re going to give up a bit of that structure. We’re going to look at the water in the background, suds and bubbles, and use these elements to hide bits we don’t want.
When we follow a formula, people tend to start off well – but at some point there will be a challenge – and then we watch the anxiety increase. We’re not going to do this today. We’re going to relinquish ourselves from the constraints of these structures, and therefore our anxiety too. This is going to be like a life exercise, this painting exercise will be a “let-go” of the structures of our lives (to some degree).
So we’re going to play a little game. Notice the dialogue in your head, while you’re painting. Start watching the voice, when it start to spiral. Keep listening. If you start feeling tense, notice that, and realise that “self talk” is not serving you, or this process. That feeling is not going to improve your outcome.
We’re going to dance with the circumstances. See what happens when we paint an element – and if we don’t like it, add some bubbles to hide or de-emphasise it!
Having said all that, there is some information that is very important. For example the whale shapes, and how bubbles behave underwater.
Air will do two things underwater. When it’s pushed down, it’ll form particular shapes, and then when it tries to go up again, it will behave and look different again.
So, a quick aside: About a week after Mark’s brain surgery he went to paint for the first time. He realised quickly that the technical, mechanical skills would need to be re-learned. However, the thing that made him weep tears of joy, was that the questions were still there. Things like, “where is the light coming from?”, “what shape is that leaf?”, “what colour would that shadow be?”.
The questions are most important. Especially when your anxiety kicks in. When you feel this happening, try to take “you” out of the equation, to attempt to look at it dispassionately. For example, instead of going on a thought spiral of how terrible you are at painting, think (for example) “what could I do to improve that shape?” When you take “you” out of the equation, you free yourself to create.
How to paint a whale – sketch it out
So, we’re going to start with chalk this morning, and we’re going to chalk in your whale. Then later on we’re going to colour it in!
We’re going to stick with the basic shape of the whale, with his snoot sticking out and down a little, just to keep it a bit easier.
Mark chalked in a couple of different whale shapes on a dark background to demonstrate the different parts of a whale. One a whale about to breach, showing the belly. The “throat pleats” can be quite difficult to manage effectively, so we’re just going to represent those in a less technically realistic way.
At this point we spent a bit of time looking at whale shapes, pectoral fins for example are a third of the length of a humpback whale.
Everyone spent a good while chalking in their whales with Mark’s help. Those who were ready to move on used thinned Dioxazine Purple to “lock in” those shapes and lines of the whale’s body.
At this point Mark called everyone up the front to demonstrate on the black canvas using a dark mix of Atelier Interactive Pthalo Blue, Cadmium Yellow Light, Burnt Umber and a very small amount of White. Mark painted a whale shape in, that was similar to the background canvas (black) colour, just to demonstrate how little detail you need to put in to demonstrate realism.
He then mixed Pthalo Blue and White to start painting the highlights. He added more White to this colour to build up these highlights, and kept adding more white moving into the foreground elements, to get the idea of how this whale is receding off into the distance. He added a tiny bit of reflection on the underside of the surface of the water to “place” the whale in the picture.
This demo shows how Mark has pretty much just painted the highlights. But you can take this further. These are strategies that you will be using in your own painting.
When painting your own whale, keep in mind anything you want to appear further away is going to have more Pthalo Blue (water colour) in it, and anything closer to you is going to have more White.
Mark also demonstrated a “bubble” technique using a ratty old brush and a downward kind of “stabby” motion. Again, adding more Pthalo Blue to the bubbles pushes them further away.
Mark started by dishing out colours on his palette – Burnt Umber, French Ultramarine Blue, Pthalo Blue and White.
