Monthly Retrospective: July 2023

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July saw me working on my Summer Palette mark II, National Parks, skies, and seas! By the numbers, I did 24 paintings in July, of which: The Paintings Click on the image to open in a new tab.

Artist Palette Profiles: JMW Turner

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So far, I have mostly profiled contemporary artists in the Artist Profile series, except for my first entry of Monet; but I’m on an art history kick after reading Watercolor: A History by Marie Salé. One of my favorite painters profiled in that book is the English painter JMW Turner (1775-1851), who is perhaps better known for oils but whose watercolors are fresh and lively.

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What does “story” mean in landscape painting?

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What does it mean for a still image to tell a story? This has always seemed to me to be an intimidating element of visual art. After all, stories are complicated! Don’t they need plot, characters, worldbuilding, themes, etc.? How do you pack all of that into an image?

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What’s the difference between Lavender and Smalt?

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In this post, I’ll be comparing Winsor & Newton’s Smalt (Dumont’s Blue), which is made from Ultramarine Violet pigment (PV15), with Daniel Smith’s Lavender – a mix of white, Ultramarine Blue, and Ultramarine Violet.

Note that the color WN calls “Smalt” is not traditional Smalt pigment, which is made from finely ground glass containing cobalt. Instead, it’s a version of Ultramarine Violet that leans heavily toward blue, somewhere between a typical Ultramarine Violet and Ultramarine Blue hue.

Because of that, I found it to be a good hue match to Lavender, which is made from a mix of Ultramarine Violet and Ultramarine Blue. The main difference is that Lavender also contains white, so it’s opaque and can have a pastel (“chalky”) appearance. Smalt has no white, so it can get darker, and is more transparent.

Both colors are granulating blue-purples with similar use cases: the violet tones in sky mixes, clouds, hazy distant mountains. I don’t think I need both, so which should I choose?

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What’s the difference between Titanium White and Zinc White?

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White is a really important color in gouache, and I defaulted to Titanium White until I started reading some interesting opinions online about Zinc White. It seems that Titanium White is more opaque and better for highlights and stars and things, but Zinc White is supposed to be a better mixing colors – to make nicer pastels.

So I got myself a tube of Zinc White gouache and tested out pastels made from Titanium vs Zinc with all my gouache colors.

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Miscellaneous Watercolor Paper Reviews

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While working on my projects of reviewing all the colors in the Jackson’s and St Cuthbert samplers, I also occasionally used other paper. Here are some loose reviews of random other papers I’ve tried in the past year, not in the context of a sampler or set. Fluid Easy Block These are about the cheapest … Read more

Monthly Retrospective: June 2023

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I started June attending a live remote class: dynamic skies with Leslie Lambert. This set the stage for month of skies! I continued doing the #skieswithjt weekly challenge by @jthomasart_ on instagram, which I started right at the end of May. I also continued my ongoing National Parks project. And I did some other paintings … Read more

Bad Photos Can Be Good Reference Photos

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One neat thing about working from my own reference photos is that they don’t need to be perfect or even good. They can have all sorts of flaws that would ordinarily exempt it from being an artistic piece of photography: poor composition, stray detail, boring bits. They just need to have one intriguing thing that … Read more