Watercolor Dirtbag
Billy Idyll 
I’m working my way through the tutorials in Wilderness Watercolor Landscapes by Kolbie Blume. It’s funny, Skies took me months, but I covered Mountains in a little over a week! I did all of these on 7×10 sample pages of different Hahnemuhle papers; you’ll see these paintings again when I review all the paper in … Read more
A recent art class assignment was to paint in a color palette inspired by a Monet painting. I chose one of the haystacks and painted a banana. While I didn’t know what colors Monet had actually used, I mixed up a palette consisting of: This got me curious. What colors did Monet actually use? I … Read more
Last time, I talked about cycles of expansiveness and restriction when it comes to art supplies and hobbies generally. Now, I’d like to apply it to palette colors. How Many Colors? Finding the “just right” number of colors is a balancing act. Having too few colors is a struggle because you’re constantly mixing, and it … Read more
Last time, I talked about how to decide which media you want to keep in your art supply closet. I chose to devote most of my room to my main hobby, watercolor. But does that mean I should keep everything? Since it’s a hobby I got into recently, I have done a ton of experimenting … Read more
I tend to go through alternating minimalist and maximalist cycles when it comes to acquiring stuff – and when it comes to taking on hobbies! Recently, I’ve been in an expansive, more-more-more phase: I started watercolor, explored various related arts like gouache and ink, got a ton of different supplies, tried new things. Now I’m entering the restrictive phase of the cycle, where I pare things down and decide what to focus on and what to let go.
Da Vinci paints are made in California and tend to be cheaper than Daniel Smith, Winsor Newton, and Schmincke (at least here in the U.S.), but to me they look just as good; some colors I like better!
Da Vinci’s dot card has only 24 colors (a fraction of its line), but they are well-chosen, vibrant, and I loved every single one. I also created more work for myself by augmenting it with a few additional colors that I wanted to try & took a chance on.
Have you ever really thought about the way you look at a painting, a photograph, or even a scene in real life? Your eyes skip around. You don’t take it in all at once, or process it neatly top-to-bottom like a computer might. You jump from one element to another, your eye drawn by those shapes, colors, and contrasts that are most interesting, unusual, or surprising.
Not everyone’s experience of the same real-life scene is the same, of course. Perhaps you and a friend are looking at the same landscape. Your eye is drawn to a yellow tree in a sea of green trees. They are more interested in a duck that’s swimming on the lake. Each of you might paint a different picture of the same scene: yours might focus on the tree and not have a duck at all, and theirs might paint the duck in loving detail while reducing the trees to a hazy background.
As an artist, you can curate your viewer’s experience. You can lead their eyes to the parts of your painting that you find most interesting and meaningful. But to do that, you need to know yourself just what it is you’re painting. What’s the center of interest?
Recently, I tried a bunch of itty-bitty 2”x3” sample-size pads to try various Legion watercolor paper options. I was especially interested in Yupo, a “tree-free” type of paper that’s totally different from typical watercolor paper. Here are my impressions.
I’d heard Photography People say “rule of thirds” long before I learned what it actually was, and it always sounded so mysterious. A secret rule that photographers use to make Art instead of Snapshots! I avoided learning about it, because I hate rules, but when I did, I actually found it very useful and now I use it all the time.