Monthly Retrospective: April 2023

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

Color Spotlight: Lemon Yellow Deep (PY159)

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

The Spring Palette

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

Da Vinci Complete Dot Cards Part 1: Yellows & Oranges

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.

Da Vinci dot card set

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. 

Da Vinci yellow, orange, and red dot card

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!

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