Playing with muted primaries...and simplifiying!
Test Driving the Muted Primaries box, originally uploaded by Cathy (Kate) Johnson.
Once again on the recent trip to Nevada I carried way too much--it's light at home, but when you're trucking from one end of an airport to another to find your gate, it gets HEAVY. So I'm experimenting to see how little I can get by with.
If I'm going out to paint plein air, seriously, I don't mind taking the backpack and "the whole catastrophe," as Zorba the Greek said. But traveling alone in airports? I'm getting too old!
So I decided to try out several re-purposed or retrofitted boxes to see if they'd work for me. There are no end of nice little commercial sketchboxes, mind you, but they all assume you want as many colors as you can possibly jam into the space alloted, which means tiny little pans of paint and seriously limited mixing areas. I like full pans and plenty of room to mix, so I'm happy to experiment with fewer colors.
In this case, muted primaries--indigo, Quinacridone burnt sienna, and gold ochre, though I may have to switch the latter out for raw sienna or yellow ochre. Can't quite get the lovely transparent shade I'm after.
There's room in this box for a 2-piece Sakura waterbrush or a travel brush (or a WC brush with the handle cut short), a stub of a pencil, a small pencil sharpener, a bit of an eraser, and a folded tissue or paper towel...pretty amazing in that small space.
Today, after I hit the hardware store (again--the house rehab is endless!), I headed for the country with this tiniest, simplest paint box, and a couple of small surface options, a 5 x 7" watercolor block and a Clester watercolor postcard pad.
This is a closeup of the tiny Altoids box I re-purposed for a paintbox, using empty full pans (that sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?) that I could fill with my own colors. (It's sitting on a highly tempting cookbook my dear friend Laura Frankstone sent me--the colors were too cool together--thank you, Laura!)
Naturally I had to paint the inside of the box white, to make a good mixing area. I used rust-resistant spray enamel that takes a good 24 hours to really dry, then when that was thoroughly dry, painted the outside with gloss black, the same stuff--how Winsor & Newton, eh? (I am not the most patient soul in the world, so waiting 4 days for paint to dry was NOT easy!)
On the pans in this box, I used self-sticking magnetic tape to hold them relatively steady, but my more successful set made use of good old rubber cement to hold the pans in place. A dot on the back of the pan and one on the inside of the box, let them dry a bit, then press them together and allow to dry thoroughly, and they're pretty stable! (Contact cement works even better, but I thought I might want to trade out the pans if I decide one color needs to be replaced.)
I added a medallion on both the little repurposed Altoids tins to help me tell them apart in a hurry...(and since Vicky asked--the medallions are left from my forays into polymer clay--I've got a whole drawer-ful of them that I use on things like this and on my journal covers.)
It was warm in the car this afternoon, with the sun pouring in the windows...too cold outside the car to sit in the wind but lovely, inside, with the window down. The cloud shadows were proceeding with great dignity across the field by the road, and the distant hill was a lovely shade of indigo when the clouds covered it.
Here's the result, below:
And wouldn't you know, I almost ran out of water in the little waterbrush--it really IS tiny. I tried pouring water from my 2-ounce travel spray bottle into it, but the surface tension kept resisting--I guess you need more of a forceful stream of water! I ended up with more water on the floor and down my arm than in the brush handle...
So for the next painting I dragged out my two Niji waterbrushes...and they were both almost empty. Less than a teaspoon of water between them. The second painting was smaller, by necessity, despite the fact that it looks larger here!
Even so, it's my favorite...I think the muted primaries worked just as I wanted them to, they're subtle and they help unify the sketch...I love the colors that cedar trees attain in the winter, that deep reddish green...
And when I got home, I filled ALL my waterbrushes, my flask, and a 1 pint water bottle and put it in the Jeep! "Be prepared"...a little late!