Watercolor Dirtbag
I have a fondness for extreme bright neons, Lisa Frank style – the brighter the better! (This post is an antidote to my last post about grays.) One of my watercolor goals was to find a primary triad that was as bright and neon as possible.
Mixing neutral gray or black is a common task in watercolor painting. Grays and other neutral dark colors are useful for shadows, landscape elements like mountains and rocks, silhouettes, and muting other shades. It’s possible to mix all your own grays and neutrals from a bright palette. Even if you choose to have a convenience gray or black watercolor on your palette, you may want to mix grays sometimes for that special, specific gray.
I’m working my way through Kolbie Blume’s tutorial book, Wilderness Watercolor Landscapes. Previously, I did the chapters on skies and mountains. Here’s all my work on the chapter on trees. Autumn Misty Pines Paper: Hahnemuhle “Burgund” 250gsm cold press Colors: Background & pines: Quin Gold, Pyrrol Scarlet, Transparent Red Oxide Foreground leaves: Mixed a scarlet … Read more
Although I like granulation now, I’m not tempted by the sets everyone in my watercolor friends-list seems to be going gaga for: the Schmincke Supergranulating colors. If you take a look at them, they are generally* not new colors, they’re mixes of other granulating colors that Schmincke (and other brands) offer. You can mix your own!
American Journey paints are an inexpensive artist-grade line exclusive to Cheap Joe’s Art Supplies. My research indicates this line is made by Da Vinci, and there do so seem to be a lot of similarities, though the lines do have some different colors. As I’ve mentioned, I love Da Vinci paints, so this was good news!
I tried American Journey’s 24-dot sampler:
Shortly after gathering my first six paints, I began to wonder about earth tones. What’s the deal with them? Do I need them? What are they good for? What are my options? How come other people seem to intuitively know the difference between “raw umber” and “burnt sienna”? What are the common, typical earth tones that teachers and tutorial designers may expect me to have in my palette, and if I don’t have them, what substitutions can I make? Which earth tones are equivalent? I’m here to answer my past self’s questions – and, maybe, yours!
I’m taking Liz Steel’s Watercolour course, and the introductory section has us experiment with paints, brushes, and paper. Having already gone down some paint rabbitholes, I found myself going overboard with paper this time! I tested nine (9) different sketchbooks.
Maria Coryell-Martin is the artist/naturist/visionary behind the Art Toolkit, my favorite gear for painting on the go (and in general). I recently took a cloudscapes class with her through Art Toolkit, and it was wonderful!
Here is the list of Daniel Smith colors that make up Maria Coryell-Martin’s Expeditionary Art palette.
When last we left my palette building saga, I was happily filling in Jane Blundell-inspired color grids, where paints are arranged in the palette in a grid of five color family columns (yellow, red, blue, green, and neutral), and four thematic rows (warm, cool, earth, and dark). However, over time, I’ve found two problems with … Read more
I purchased the Hahnemühle Selection pack, which contains one page each of 12 kinds of watercolor paper. This is not every paper that this company offers (notably missing are some of their experimental papers like ‘Agave’ that I was most interested in trying); but it covers a lot of their range and introduced me to a lot of papers I didn’t know about!
Here are my opinions, admittedly formed after trying only one 7”x10” page of each type of paper.