Watercolor Dirtbag
I’m just going to say it!
Dividing colors into “warm” and “cool” categories is a common way to organize them and think about color theory. (It’s a scheme I use to organize my dot card swatches, for example.) But it never really made a lot of sense to me, and now I know why. It’s inherently confusing!
I love Jeanne Dobie’s book Making Color Sing, which helps me think about color in new ways and has taught me lots of mind-bending lessons about using color effectively in watercolor. She shares her most commonly used palette colors in the book, so let’s dive into this color expert’s colors!
You have, or have in your cart, the items from the TL;DR watercolor starter kit, and you have a little more money burning a hole in your pocket. Or maybe you’re gift shopping for a watercolor student or hobbyist who already has the basics. What other optional items might not be bare minimum necessary for starting with watercolor, but might make the hobby a little more fun, convenient, or luxurious? Here are my recommendations.
It’s important to me that all my watercolor supplies be cute, even the most mundane. So when I adopted Kolbie Blume’s method of holding sketchbook sheets taut with binder clips, I didn’t want to just get plain old ugly black binder clips. I wanted something cute! But this most boring and common of office supplies … Read more
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?
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.
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
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?
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!
I’m working my way through the tutorials in Wilderness Watercolor Landscapes by Kolbie Blume. It’s funny, Skies took me months, but I covered Mountains in a little over a week! I did all of these on 7×10 sample pages of different Hahnemuhle papers; you’ll see these paintings again when I review all the paper in … Read more