Watercolor Dirtbag
Liz Steel is an inspiring contemporary watercolor artist known for landscapes and urban sketches, perfect for this series because she has written a lot on color and has shared her 17-color palette. Let’s take a look!
John Muir Laws wrote the book on nature journaling, literally; I really enjoyed The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling. While I’m not sure what colors Laws is actually using these days, I thought I’d take a look at the colors he suggests in his book. John Muir Laws’ Suggested Colors Slot JML Has … Read more
I love Jeanne Dobie’s book Making Color Sing, which helps me think about color in new ways and has taught me lots of mind-bending lessons about using color effectively in watercolor. She shares her most commonly used palette colors in the book, so let’s dive into this color expert’s colors!
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?
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