Supplies

Where do you get cute binder clips?

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It’s important to me that all my watercolor supplies be cute, even the most mundane. So when I adopted Kolbie Blume’s method of holding sketchbook sheets taut with binder clips, I didn’t want to just get plain old ugly black binder clips. I wanted something cute! But this most boring and common of office supplies … Read more

Elemental Color Grids!

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In my last post, I discussed using Jane Blundell’s color grid to organize my palette, and I actually ended up with two versions, which I called ‘Earth Palette’ (based most closely on Jane’s, with a gravitation toward earth tones) and ‘Sky Palette’ (remaining colors I couldn’t fit, which happened to work together as sky colors). … Read more

Artists’ Palette Profiles: Jane Blundell

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Welcome back to my Artist Palette Profile series, where I try to find the palette an artist actually uses, and try to come up with a similar set of colors using the ones I own (my “library” of paints, some of which are on my current palette and others in the back catalogue). Today, I’ll be coming up with my own version of Jane Blundell’s Ultimate Mixing Palette: a set of 14 colors designed to mix easily so that the colors you want to make for landscapes, portraits, and botanical work can be mixed with only two colors in most cases.

Jane Blundell is an Australian artist whose website contains a huge wealth of information about color, pigment, and palette-building, included swatches from hundreds of paints. Her website was the first place I learned about pigments and I’ve been hugely influenced by her palette choices. So how does my current palette compare?

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Mix Your Own: Daniel Smith

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Scratch sheet where I handmixed several homebrew versions of Daniel Smith mixes

While I tend to prefer single pigment colors to mixes, it’s no question that there are some beautiful mixes out there! Premixed paints can be great time-savers. I also like that they give me ideas for neat ways to mix my single pigment paints – as long as you can understand the pigment codes on the bottle!

In swatching out the dot cards for Daniel Smith, as well as looking up what pigments each color is made of, I came to recognize pigment codes on sight. Just from looking at the tube, I can easily tell what pigments mixed paints are made of, and what single-pigment colors map to the components, giving me a good idea of how to mix it up myself. It occurred to me that not everyone has this superpower, so I made this handy lookup post!

If you ever wondered “How do I mix…” amongst the mixes in Daniel Smith’s line, look no further!

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Artist Palette Profiles: Claude Monet

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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

Decluttering My Art Supply Closet Part I: Choosing My Media

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Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

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. 

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Da Vinci Dot Cards!

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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.

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Legion Sample Size Paper Reviews

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Legion Yupo sample size paper, with a #10 Velvetouch brush for size comparison.

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.

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