Doing the Thing When You Think You Suck At the Thing

Sometimes you just have to paint cats on it and live to fight another day. A galaxy night sky I was disappointed in, November 2021.

Being a beginner is hard work. Old hands take a lot of things for granted: They know their equipment. They have the basic equipment. They’ve built up muscle memory. They know what style they do. They have a style. They can reliably produce at least a few types of images. They don’t have to look absolutely everything up. 

Why can’t I skip to the step where I’m good at things? 

Here’s what I’m beginning to wonder, though. Is there a point where you feel you are good at things? 

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Do you have to be able to draw to do watercolor?

I drew a lot of magic anime girls when I was a teenager so the idea of drawing doesn’t bother me in theory, but I went into watercover very nervous about my ability to draw landscapes – things like mountains and trees – which I had never practiced before. Tutorials that started with drawing made me nervous. How can I paint something if I can’t draw it?

After working at watercolor drawing and painting for the last year, I believe that they are different, but related skills. It’s definitely possible to learn to paint something without knowing the techniques for effectively drawing the same thing. So if you can’t draw, or don’t really want to learn because paint interests you more, don’t worry. But you may learn more than you think about drawing through the process of watercolor.

Quick sketches showing different ways of composing the same scene: mountain peak in the middle, or mountain peak on the side?

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Elemental Color Grids!

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

Artists’ Palette Profiles: Jane Blundell

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?

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Mix Your Own: Daniel Smith

Scratch sheet where I handmixed several homebrew versions of Daniel Smith mixes

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!

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Artist Palette Profiles: Claude Monet

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

Decluttering My Art Supply Closet Part I: Choosing My Media

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

I tend to go through alternating minimalist and maximalist cycles when it comes to acquiring stuff – and when it comes to taking on hobbies! Recently, I’ve been in an expansive, more-more-more phase: I started watercolor, explored various related arts like gouache and ink, got a ton of different supplies, tried new things. Now I’m entering the restrictive phase of the cycle, where I pare things down and decide what to focus on and what to let go. 

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