Mixing neutral gray or black is a common task in watercolor painting. Grays and other neutral dark colors are useful for shadows, landscape elements like mountains and rocks, silhouettes, and muting other shades. It’s possible to mix all your own grays and neutrals from a bright palette. Even if you choose to have a convenience gray or black watercolor on your palette, you may want to mix grays sometimes for that special, specific gray.
Paint
I Refuse to Buy Schmincke’s Supergranulating Paints
Although I like granulation now, I’m not tempted by the sets everyone in my watercolor friends-list seems to be going gaga for: the Schmincke Supergranulating colors. If you take a look at them, they are generally* not new colors, they’re mixes of other granulating colors that Schmincke (and other brands) offer. You can mix your own!
American Journey Dot Cards!
American Journey paints are an inexpensive artist-grade line exclusive to Cheap Joe’s Art Supplies. My research indicates this line is made by Da Vinci, and there do so seem to be a lot of similarities, though the lines do have some different colors. As I’ve mentioned, I love Da Vinci paints, so this was good news!
I tried American Journey’s 24-dot sampler:
What’s the deal with earth tones?
Shortly after gathering my first six paints, I began to wonder about earth tones. What’s the deal with them? Do I need them? What are they good for? What are my options? How come other people seem to intuitively know the difference between “raw umber” and “burnt sienna”? What are the common, typical earth tones that teachers and tutorial designers may expect me to have in my palette, and if I don’t have them, what substitutions can I make? Which earth tones are equivalent? I’m here to answer my past self’s questions – and, maybe, yours!
Artist Palette Profiles: Maria Coryell-Martin
Maria Coryell-Martin is the artist/naturist/visionary behind the Art Toolkit, my favorite gear for painting on the go (and in general). I recently took a cloudscapes class with her through Art Toolkit, and it was wonderful!
Here is the list of Daniel Smith colors that make up Maria Coryell-Martin’s Expeditionary Art palette.
Palette Building Evolution: Secondary Color Grid
When last we left my palette building saga, I was happily filling in Jane Blundell-inspired color grids, where paints are arranged in the palette in a grid of five color family columns (yellow, red, blue, green, and neutral), and four thematic rows (warm, cool, earth, and dark). However, over time, I’ve found two problems with … Read more
Artist Palette Profiles: Claire Giordano
I love Claire Giordano’s quick but detailed mountain landscapes and I am a proud student of her Adventure Art Academy. According to Claire’s resource guide, her palette has changed depending on the landscape where she paints, and I’ve seen a few iterations of it, but this is what’s currently covered in her video, Colors in My Adventure Painting Kit. All colors are Daniel Smith.
What’s the best artist-grade paint brand for beginners?
I’m by no means enough of an expert watercolorist to say “what’s the best paint brand” since there are doubtless things about watercolor and how to use it that I haven’t even begun to imagine. But as a person who just began watercolor last year, I am enough of a beginner, still, to know what feels easy or hard when you’re starting out. I’ve also tried a ton of paint in my short time since beginning watercolor because I enjoy trying things out. I feel like I’ve tried enough of the major artist-grade watercolor paint brands to get an idea of their personalities, and I have strong opinions about which ones are easier to work with for less-experienced artists.
Mixing Muted Sea Blues
What’s the best color for the sea? Like the sky, the sea varies a lot by place and time of day, but where I live, in Northeastern United States, it rarely appears bright blue. Rather, it is usually more muted with tones of gray, green, and brown, as seen in the Maine lighthouse photo above.
How do you approximate that color? A lot has to do with context (you could use gray, for example, and in context it would appear to be a blue sea), but I wondered if there was a quick way to mix two colors – say, a blue and a red-orange to mute it – to come up with a muted blue that would remind me of this type of sea.
Here are my experiments.
I Like Granulation Now
I’ve been saying since I started watercolor over a year ago that I don’t like granulation; I tend to choose colors that are clean and transparent as tinted glass, like Quin Rose and Phthalo Blue. I avoided fan favorite Ultramarine for a long time because of the unpredictable textures that the granulation caused; I couldn’t … Read more