Watercolor Dirtbag
Billy Idyll The theme of this month was spring! I built my Spring Palette and painted some swatches and paintings – indoors and out – using spring colors and themes. Focusing more on my actual surroundings, I took a break from my National Park project until late in the month (then rapidly did four). It was an … Read more
I’m working my way through the Da Vinci Dot Card set. This time: Greens!
PY159 is a granulating, low-strength primary yellow. It’s available as Winsor & Newton Lemon Yellow Deep (shown here), or as Schmincke’s Volcano Yellow (from the Supergranulating line). Experiment Results Gradient: Slighlty dull granulating mid-yellow in masstone, pale yellow otherwise. Very difficult to get a masstone and doesn’t grade easily. Does not rewet easily. Opacity: Semi-transparent… … Read more
This is a guest post by my watercolor buddy Hanna. Hanna is one of the most meticulous planners and evaluators of watercolor pigments and brands that I know! There are many professional watercolor brands out there. All have their fans, and all can be used to produce beautiful works of art. That said, they do … Read more
I’ve been going through the complete Da Vinci Dot Card set. This time: Blues!
Hooker’s Green is named for the English botanical illustrator William Hooker (1779-1832), who originally created the green as a leaf mix from Prussian Blue and Gamboge.
Every brand has their own formula for this green, but generally modern versions mix Phthalo Green with yellow-orange.
Spring is the final season I haven’t paletted! I put together my first seasonal palettes at the end of summer 2022, doing both Summer and Autumn around the same time. I followed it up with Winter in December. Inspirations Spring Nature Spots I kicked off April by doing a series of nature spots in my … Read more
I’ve been going through the complete, 110-color range of Da Vinci from their dot cards.
Last time I looked at yellow and orange; this time, I’ll look at reds, including warm scarlet reds and cool magentas.
Australian Red Gold (or Aussie Red Gold in DS parlance) is a warm, glowing, orange mix originally created by the Australian brand Art Spectrum. This is a brand that’s hard to get ahold of in the US so I’m bringing you the Daniel Smith version.
When I originally swatched Da Vinci, the only dot card they offered was a tiny one with just 24 of their 100+ colors. They finally released a full dot card set of all their colors, so naturally I jumped on it, as Da Vinci is one of my favorite lines!
The 110 colors come in a set of five 24-well clamshell boxes.
Just like the 24-color set, the dots are very generous – you could do a whole painting with one, and I did multiple swatches instead of the barely-one I could do with the DS and WN dot cards.
I ended up going a bit deeper in this dot card exploration than in previous dot card posts – because I have a pretty solid paint library already, I was able to compare several of the colors in the same light to colors I already have in order to make comparisons on-the-fly. So, I’ll be breaking this out into several posts to be able to give each one more attention.
First up: Yellows and oranges!