I have spent a good bit of this pandemic reading and getting lost in the YouTube art scene. Seeing so many talented people create beautiful and dreamy compositions really got me excited and gave me the inspiration I needed to get serious about getting on track with improving my skills with physical media again. Deciding to focus on one medium at a time for now, I’ve gotten serious about refreshing what I know, or thought I knew, about these mediums. I’m going with watercolors first as the challenge month is upon us and I’ve been itching to make my own color palette based on all the notes I’ve made thus far. I talked about the book I found most rejuvenating by James Gurney, Color and Light in an older post.
I’ve been meaning to improve my watercolor game for a few years now. I first explored the medium in high school and totally fell for how the colors looked like they were glowing when applied to paper. I tried to play more with the medium after high school, but could never achieve the same results I had in class, so I moved away form it. A few years ago I got back into wanting to use the medium again and looked into buying a decent premade set. I found the 24 pan White Nights set and used that for a bit, and even though it’s a beautiful set, I still didn’t feel as attached to it and wound up going to Gauche when my local art supply shop closed down and had a massive sale on everything in stock.
I have since left Gauche alone as the ones I had did not re-wet all too well and I rotate mediums, so ones that expire fast are off the table, but hey, play and learn.
The mediums that I come back to repeatedly and have this considered my stickers are Alcohol markers, Watercolors, Acrylic Ink, and of course digital painting (Procreate and Clip Studio Paint). I know that sounds like a lot, but trust me, this is the narrowed focus list. I LOVE customizing and that extends to every part of my life. From what I wear, to what I eat, and of course what I create. I can never just follow a recipe without throwing my own spin on it and the same goes for picking my supplies. The mediums that I actually stick with are ones that I invested the time to create my own custom sets of. It took me a second to really think about that (even though it’s totally obvious).
I spent months comparing colors for my Copic collection before ordering each marker individually. I spent weeks looking into ink properties and color combinations for my Acrylic Ink sets, I spent years looking into individual pens and pencils for drawing. When it came to watercolors, I just found a decent set and wondered why I wasn’t as excited to create with it. Even if it was a fantastic set. Open Stock is truly the way to go for me. The study, comparisons, and care that go into selecting each color makes it meaningful and gives me that much more reason to want create. That’s what was missing from my watercolor selections. Not the quality of paints, but the journey of customizing my own palette.
Painting is such a unique medium. You can make new colors from just having a small selection of colors available to you and that’s pretty neat, some knowledge on color theory will helps to avoid a ton of repeated color mixes, or over mixing in general when building a custom limited palette. Limited color choices in painting palettes are a fantastic way to see color theory in action too. My style is definitely more illustrative so I knew that I would need the ability to mix bold colors and a range of skin tones.
I studied swatches from Jane Blundell’s blog, if it’s worth a dang in the watercolor world, she’s swatched it. I then would check out Denise, of In Liquid Color to see the paints in action as she has extensive color spot light videos, reviews, and tutorials on color mixing. I also enjoyed checking out Sadie Saves the Day for more examples on beautiful illustrations and helpful reviews and information on the medium too!
For anyone that wants a quick cheat sheet to putting together a legit color palette, I’d recommend this really neat post On the Jackson’s Art blog. It’s a short and sweet entry about choosing colors for a limited pallets and its fantastic advice for crafting a limited pallet that will create a wide array of lovely mixes. Definitely worth a read if you are trying to figure out what colors to use and why when you’re starting in watercolor.
There are more resources that I used, but these are the ones I found myself going back to repeatedly when crafting my palette. Once I had my list of colors together, I was ready to shop! Of course the pandemic has art supplies in short supply, but I was fortunate enough to find what I needed through three store: Dickblick, Jerrys Artarama, and Jackson’s Art in the UK, sadly my local art supply shop packed up shop last year, so I’ve had to move supply hunting all online now since they only things left in town are Michael’s and Hobby Lobby, so yeah…nah.
The other supplies I purchased were a palette that I’d be able to add more to later for my studio, the MITJELLO 18 well palette and the Portable Paint Palette for on the go. It has 12 wells and I love its design! I had all the other tools already, but did up my brush game as I realized of all the brushes I have, the only ones I use are the Jackson’s brand Quill Brushes, I have this brush in a variety of sizes. The only brush I use that isn’t in this quill family is a 00 round for detail. They are such lovely and cheap brushes. They feel good, have a variety of sizes, go thin to thick, hold a good amount of water, and they are forgiving if I leave them in water by accident. I KKKNOOOWWW that’s a terrible habit, but I have short term memory problems that crop up at funny times and finding my brushes in good health after one of these bouts feels good.
While waiting on my supplies to arrive, I continued to practice with my older paint sets, is what I‘d love to say I did, but I didn’t. Instead, I got familiar with setting up mixing charts and read the New Encyclopedia of Watercolor Techniques: A step-by-Step Visual Directory of Watercolor Techniques by Diana Craig & Hazel Harrison and the Dreamscapes watercolor series by Stephanie Pui-mun Law. Fantastic books on using watercolors and achieving neat practical effects. I created a whole list of exercises to practice as I read too! Once I received all of my packages, I primed my palettes (made dot cards of the access paint to not be wasteful) and let my paints dry. Check them out!!
Next I’m going to paint out my watercolor mixing chart for my large palette and then make some smaller swatch sheets for the portable pallet to use for reference. I’ve studied for this and know the colors I have will make some cool colors, but being able to see the nuance of each color in person has me excited.
