Pine is the classic conifer, and where I live, the mighty towering Easter White Pine is king!
Nature Notebook: Pine
What’s the best blue watercolor for the sky?
It happens to be a day with a beautiful blue sky as I write this today, so I can compare my blue paints to the sky in to real life. Which one will win??
Nature Notebook: Elm
Welcome to a new feature here on the blog! In an effort to learn how to paint trees, as well as to learn more about them, I’m going to do a series of tree profiles, where I attempt to paint a tree, and provide fun facts and identification tips about that family of tree. I also love taking pictures of trees, so I have a large back catalogue of tree photos in on my phone which I can use to help illustrate the points.
I’m keeping the title general (“Nature Notebook”) to allow me to explore other plant or animal species as I see fit!
My first tree is Elm!
American Elm (Ulmus Americana): Winter silhouette, summer silhouette, leaf detail
Winsor & Newton Dot Cards!
I got more dot cards! I’m dotty for dot cards!
Overall Brand Impressions: This is the smallest of the dot card catalogs I’ve tried so far, 109 colors to Daniel Smith’s 238 and Schmincke’s 140. Still, I didn’t swatch them all out because I was running out of room in my color sketchbook, so I started to triage colors I was most interested in. Either way, I didn’t notice any colors missing.
The colors I swatched out tended to be pleasingly vibrant with a high pigment load, and they were easy to handle even for my inexperienced hands (much easier than Schmincke). Most were non-granulating, which I prefer. I was overall pleased!
The only thing that gives me pause about the company from my experiences so far is their price (a bit on the high side) combined with my impression that they’re sort of nickel-and-dimey. The dots were pretty flat and less generous than other brands’, so I couldn’t do more than basic swatches; I couldn’t make the larger color spotlights, or test-drive a painting with them. Also, standard WN tubes are 14ml, unlike the 15ml of every other brand, driving the price-per-ounce even higher when you take into the account the higher price tag.
Overall, I’m unlikely to choose a WN version of a color unless I have a distinct preference for it over Daniel Smith. So… will it happen??
Below, my dot card journey.
Loved & Learned: Kolbie Blume’s Wilderness Watercolor Landscapes, Chapter 1: Skies
After completing Kolbie Blume’s 10 Day #PaintingtheWilderness Challenge, I loved her easy yet magical tutorials so much that I immediately bought her book, Wilderness Watercolor Landscapes. If you enjoyed the challenge and want more tutorials, the book delivers! I’m going to continue the “loved and learned” process from the 10-day challenge for my paintings from the book.
So far, I have completed the tutorials from the first chapter of the book, featuring skies. Here are the paintings I did, all based on Blume’s tutorials from the book, and what I loved and learned from each one.
The TL;DR Watercolor Starter Kit
This is the post I wish I’d been able to read when I first decided to start watercolor but before I’d bought anything. What’s the minimum, yet best, materials to get started?
No Plan, No Problem: Intuitive Watercolor Without Planning Ahead
When I was a kid, my brother and I had a game where each of us drew an abstract shape – it could be a scribble, a shape, any set of marks – and then traded papers. Our task was then to turn the other person’s abstract shape into something. You could add anything you … Read more
Which watercolor palette should I choose?
Typically when I talk about “choosing your palette,” I mean choosing which colors to paint with. But this post is on the physical item, a paint palette. Because this is an extremely low-stakes decision, of course I have written one of my longest posts about it.
It’s okay to be basic.
I mentioned last post that I’ve been reading a lot of watercolor books, some of which I find off-putting. But even among those that I like and that I learn a lot from, I’ve yet to read one that does not, at some point, completely alienate me by making a little dig at something I like. Usually, it’s bright colors.
Rules vs. Tools
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of watercolor books from the library. It is a great source of hidden gems, but I’ve also waded through a lot of material that does nothing for me and, if anything, turns me off the medium. I’m glad I didn’t find those books first!
Nothing alienates me quicker than an approach to art that is rules-based: “Do this, not that.” “This is wrong, this is right.” “No. Incorrect.” I thought art was subjective! I am simultaneously too freewheeling and too analytical to accept rules-based systems, because in addition to being rigid, they also tend to be contradictory. Any system of art rules invariably ends with “Rule 10: Break the rules,” which invalidates the whole system.
That’s not to say that I don’t want any information or tips. I am reading a book to learn, after all. Teachers can also go too far the other way, simply saying “It’s all up to you! Everything is right! There are no rules! That splotch you made looks great!” And like… I guess I don’t disagree, but this is not helping me learn to paint the way I want to paint. It feels almost like knowledge-hoarding where the teacher does know how to achieve certain effects but won’t share.
So how can a teacher thread the needle between being unhelpfully rigid and unhelpfully vague?