Watercolor Dirtbag
Kolbie Blume (@thiswritingdesk) has been an important and formative watercolor teacher to me, and some of my first “eureka!” watercolor lessons were from their 10-Day #PaintingtheWilderness Challenge on Youtube. I don’t know what’s on Kolbie’s palette these days (I suspect it changes regularly), so today, I will be looking at the colors that are suggested in the introduction to Kolbie’s two books:Wilderness Watercolor Landscapes and Stunning Watercolor Seascapes.
This is the crossroads I have reached when trying to optimize my color selection for everyday painting. What is a mixing palette? My strategy so far has been to gravitate toward a mixing palette: choosing colors based on their ability to be used as the building blocks for other colors in mixes. This means … Read more
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!
Let’s say you have no more than $50 to spend on your first artist grade watercolors. What’s a good set to begin with? Here are some recommendations, based on my assessment of whether the colors included give you a good set of mixers to start with. (You do not need to buy more than one … Read more
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!
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
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?
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!
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