A new season, a new sketchbook for me. And all of the best plans just waiting to happen. This is an 8 x 8 hand.book watercolor journal. I began my usual way with a calendar on the first page, and my travel watercolor palette on the next. The sketch above was done with watercolor only of daffodils from my yard. They are in one of those old glass milk bottles, the kind we used to get in school with the waxed cardboard cap, if you are old enough to remember that. From the scan you can see the previous page shows through where I painted the colors in my palette.
The only adjustment I have made from my previous travel palette is to remove sap green and put cerulean blue back instead. I know. Sap green. One of my long standing "go-to" colors in my watercolor palette. However, lately I find that I am using mixes for greens rather than relying on green pigments.
Just to prove to myself that I would be happier with an additional blue (cerulean) and that I wouldn't even miss sap green, I played around with mixing various greens. Although the scan is a poor representation of the actual colors, there in the center, a mix of phthalo turquoise and gamboge results if a beautiful sap green that has more depth than sap green straight from the tube. I am keeping phthalo green (blue shade). It is a color that I find much too intense to use on its own, but it results in beautiful mixes such as grays when mixed with alizarin or burnt sienna and rich greens when mixed with various yellows. It is good to change things occasionally. Even small changes can create new and interesting challenges.
Familiarity enables us to tame, control, and ultimately forget the mystery.
~John O'Donohue~
Anam Cara
3 comments:
Really interesting post
Thank you Polly! It's nice to know someone is reading my ramblings :-)
A lovely spring painting Anne! I too, like to change out a color or two from time to time.
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