Watercolor Dirtbag
I haven’t engaged much with my username on this blog, so you’ve gotten a lot more straightforward art talk than any Billy Idol theming; but the phrase “Rebel Yellow” popped into my head and I just had to make a palette. Billy Idol’s signature color is black – as in black leather. He’s also known … Read more
A common piece of advice for watercolor beginners is to start with a limited palette: only buy, say, 3-6 colors. But is this really practical advice?
Welcome to fall! Here in Massachusetts, the leaves are just turning, and I just came back from a long weekend a few hours north in New Hampshire, where the foliage is popping off. So I decided this autumn I would build a foliage-specific palette. Inspiration I combined lessons learned from my Autumn Palette mark I, … Read more
Lee Angold is a Canadian botanical and scientific illustrator focusing on plants and other natural subjects. One great resource on their website is a spreadsheet of pigments compared across brands. They’ve also done cool experiments like painting a blue subject from green and purple. I love a person with strong opinions about color.
Let’s take a look at their palette as of June 2021 from the post “What’s in my studio palette.” Be sure to visit this post for more about the reasoning for each paint.
One of my favorite gouache artists is Kelley Vivian, who paints gorgeous nature scenes typically in New England settings. She has painted numerous National Parks across the US, but her local park, like mine, is Acadia in Maine, and I just love her homey-looking Maine landscapes and seascapes, complete with lots of evergreen trees and rocky beaches. I especially like the way she treats golden hour and sunset light, with glowing sunlight flashing through the trees.
Kelley’s work was an inspiration to me picking up gouache, and I consulted her site when choosing my gouache palette. Here’s what I learned.
A few months ago I mixed up some bright greens with my various greens/blues and yellows. This time, I decided to try intentionally to mix dark greens, using either dark blues with yellows, or phthalo greens with reds to mute them.
As I transition from a watercolor-only artist to watercolor-and-gouache, I’m finding that it’s harder to find lightfast pigments in gouache, even in professional/artist lines. I love Holbein and Winsor & Newton’s gouache, but I’ve seen so many pigments in their lines with super-low ASTM lightfastness ratings – not just the typical fluorescents (which are also much more widespread in gouache), but stuff like PR1 or PR60 that are uncommon in watercolor because they’re notoriously fugitive. What gives?
I previously explained how to mix your own version of mixed Daniel Smith colors, and now I’d like to do the same for Mission Gold! Recently I happened to be window-shopping their line and saw some good ones that gave me new ideas for cool mixes. That’s cool thing about exploring brands’ commercial mixes – even if you don’t buy the paint, it can inspire your own explorations at home, if you have the component colors.
Lately, I’ve been on a nontoxic paint kick, trying to see if I can be just as happy with a nontoxic palette as with one that contains toxic paints made from heavy metals such as cadmium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and copper. This is mostly a personal challenge, as I think toxic paints are fine for adults to paint with as long as you don’t put them in your mouth, but I’m a messy painter so it does put my mind at ease a bit to be using the safest pigments. Plus, they’re better for the environment.
So, what colors would I put in a nontoxic palette? How do you replace common toxic colors? And after a couple of months, which paints do I miss? Read on!
Lightfastness refers to the permanence of a pigment; some pigments tend to fade, darken, or otherwise change color with prolonged exposure to ultraviolet light, such as when displayed on the wall in a sunny room. The most lightfast a pigment is, the longer it can withstand the sun without changing color. Some pigments can last for hundreds of years. Others – fugitive pigments – tend to fade within months, unless kept away from light (such as in a closed sketchbook) or in carefully controlled museum lighting conditions.
My favorite online pigment experts, such as Bruce MacEvoy and Kim Crick, tend to base their opinions of various pigments in large part on lightfastness. But is this something I really need to care about as a beginner?
(My short answer is no, by the way, but read on.)