Inspired by Sarah Burns, I decided to try Plein Airpril this year! This is a month of daily plein air practice. I’ll be blogging a little differently this month, too! Normally I write posts ahead and schedule them to appear 3 times a week. In order to track my Plein Airpril progress, I’ve instead cleared the runway for April. Let’s see if I manage to do more realtime blogging of my progress. I expect that each entry will be shorter, but with more in-the-moment notes.
Blues and Browns Only
While Johnny Thomas’ sky challenge is still ongoing – I dip in and out occasionally – over the last six weeks he set the limited Blues & Browns Only challenge (#bluesandbrownsonly), painting a series of six reference photos using only shades of blue and earth tones.
I was eager to take on this challenge to stretch myself to see the chromaticity in earth tones. Historically I’ve preferred brighter colors, but my appreciation for more subtle colors has been trending slowly upward. Could this challenge convince me to finally become an earth color person?
Winter Palette 2.5
As we close winter and begin to enter spring, I wanted to note some slight changes I made to Winter Palette 2 throughout the season.
Fun Making Color Wheels with Artist Pigment Dot Org
A new artist pal got me onto artistpigments.org, a cool website that allows you to enter your specific paint collection and chart each color on various theoretical color wheels. This is cool! I immediately charted my entire paint collection.
13 Cool Historical Paints
Some of our most popular paint colors are based on traditional dyes or pigments with interesting histories. Let me introduce you to some of my favorites.
All About Color Index Codes
I began writing an explanation of color index codes in another post, but it became too long so I’m putting it in its own post!
The short explanation is that watercolor paints have “ingredients” labels that can be read to identify which pigments are in them. For example, Ultramarine Blue has the code PB29 (Pigment Blue #29). If you see PB29 on a paint label – for example, in Daniel Smith’s Undersea Green, which is PB29, PY150, PO48 – you generally know you can mix a similar color with Ultramarine Blue as one of the ingredients.
The long explanation? You can learn to decode these seemingly arbitrary color codes, and here’s how!
Cross-Hobby Post: Winter Running!
Sometimes I use my blog to expound about some other topic aside from watercolor, especially when I find some obscure set-up that works. I like blogging because it lets me take notes on discoveries I’ve had, especially seasonal ones, so that I can refer back to them the following year when I inevitably forget. Today, I’ll be talking about my hobby of winter running!
I did a watercolor chart of my supplies to tangentially bring in a watercolor angle.
Artist Palette Profiles: Shelley Prior
Shelley Prior is Canadian artist from Burlington, ON whose skies I really admire! She creates glowing, luminous cloudscapes. She lists her palette on her Materials page.
Finding Your Art Style
I find it hard to tell my own style. I look at my art and I know what I was trying to do, or what my reference looked like. I can imagine what other favorite artists would have done with the piece. My own work looks like a bad version of what I was trying … Read more
Artist Palette Profiles: Mike Daikubara
Mike Daikubara is an urban sketcher based in Charlotte, NC and the author of Sketch First, Think Later and Color First, Ink Later. Sketch First, Think Later encourages you to get out and sketch quickly with a minimal kit; Color First describes a slightly more involved, wild style where you put down layers of dripping color to capture light and shadow and color interplay, then draw ink lines and details after it dries. I enjoyed both books, though the Color First method seems a bit advanced for me!
Today, I’m going to talk about Mike’s palette as described in Color First.