Watercolor Dirtbag
Paul George is a landscape artist from Massachusetts who shares oil and watercolor painting tutorials on Youtube. After reading about it on Laura’s Watercolors in early February, I tried his Essex Saltmarsh tutorial. It was fun, and I found I didn’t have to make that many color substitutions! I then looked up his video on his palette. I’ve done my best to recreate it from my collection below.
I’m going way back in time for this one – back to the 1400s! We’re looking at the palette of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). This has got to be the earliest palette I’ll be able to identify.
InThe History of Watercolour, Marie-Pierre Salé considers Dürer the “first watercolorist,” not because he invented watercolor (people have been painting with pigment suspended in water since cave painting days), but because he’s one of the first Western artists known to have used the medium to its fullest for works of art (rather than incidental illustration of illuminated manuscripts and so forth). Dürer created landscapes and incredibly detailed natural history paintings.
So what was in his palette? What pigments even existed then??
Chromium Oxide Green (PG17) is an extremely opaque, lightly granulating single-pigment dull green. It’s a nice color for desert plants, but not the only nice color, and I haven’t found another use for it. So, I’ve been wondering if I want to remove it from my extended palette. I sometimes feel when I’m making color spotlights that I accidentally mix a hue. So let’s try mixing a hue on purpose.
I have a new gouache theory.
When I first posted my gouache observations and palette, I noted that some of my favorite watercolor pigments – the transparent, high-tinting ones in the phthalo and quinacridone families – don’t always make good gouache, because gouache is meant to be opaque. Phthalo Green gouache, for example, while thicker and less transparent than the corresponding watercolor, still isn’t opaque, and when you paint it out it can appear patchy. My favorite gouache colors were opaque pigments with more robust coverage: colors like Titanium White (PW6) and Hansa Yellow Light (PY3).
I’ve come to realize, though, that there is still important value to those less-opaque colors, especially the ones with high tinting strength, because they can be great mixing colors. You just need to combine them with another color that has the desired opaque properties. You mix practically everything in gouache with at least a little white, anyway, so it’s not such a big deal that not every color has perfect coverage alone.
I now mentally divide my gouache palette into two categories: base colors and mixing colors.
Now seems like a good time to review what’s in my palette. It’s been awhile – my last palette map was nearly a year ago, in March 2023. I keep swapping stuff in and out so much that I never feel it’s in a stable state, but you have to snapshot sometime.
I recently enjoyed reading Joyce Hicks’ Painting Beautiful Watercolor Landscapes: Transform Ordinary Places into Extraordinary Scenes (2014, North Light Books) and painted out a palette inspired by the one she describes in the book. Of all the palettes I’ve explored, I think this might the best one I have enjoyed the most and most wanted to emulate in my own painting!
Two books on creativity that I recently enjoyed were Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and Find Your Artistic Voice by Lisa Congdon. Gilbert focuses mainly on writing and Congdon on visual art, but there’s enough overlap between the two to begin building a generalized theory of creativity. Concepts Here are some of the concepts from … Read more
I got started on some long term goals this month! TOTAL: 17 (16 WC, 1 gouache) Supplies notes: Unless otherwise noted, I used Arches 140lb/300gsm natural white cold-press paper. After doing a lot of experimenting, I think this is my default “good paper.” The Paintings Click on the image to open a large version in … Read more
Lisa Spangler (@sideoats) ran the Nature Spot Challenge a second time in January 2024, and I participated again! I really enjoyed the first Nature Spot Challenge last year, so I was pleased to do it again. I managed to do one every day for the first two weeks of the month, but in the back … Read more
Alizarin Crimson is a notoriously beautiful and fugitive pigment. Many people now use Quinacridone Rose (PV19), Carmine (PR176), or other alternatives, but the color is often pinker and not as deep. So how can we mix a hue?
While I don’t have the original Alizarin Crimson (PR83) to compare to, I’m using Da Vinci Alizarin Crimson Quinacridone (PV19) as a point of comparison (upper left).
Here’s what I came up with.