Warming up to my 3 Day Novel...
I'm getting ready to start writing at midnight tonight.
Every month there's a Theme Week and I usually do the art on the 1st of the month. However, because I will be pounding on the last third of my Three Day Novel on the first, I can't do my usual Theme Week $4.99 contest special ACEOs. So, because I don't like missing Theme Week either, I painted one of them today.
But you don't get to see it yet, not till the first when it's an active listing on eBay. I slept till one in the afternoon after staying up till seven in the morning -- a solid six hours of sleep that left me rested and optimistic with plenty of daylight left for Last Minute Art that is actually due before midnight tonight or just won't be created. I now have one Theme Week watercolor ACEO finished and drying.
I used some fairly wet techniques on it so it's going to take a while to dry completely before I dare plop it onto the scanner. TW's theme for September is "Favorite TV Show or Movie."
Er... right. This from the man who doesn't watch television for years at a time and only watches movies if kkitten42 rents them. But I thought back and realized my tastes were set during the summers as a little kid -- nature documentaries. So my ACEO is a nature scene that's a tribute to "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom." I think the theme was actually favorite childhood TV or movie or I'd be thinking of doing some tribute to the BBC Walking With series.
I knew I was going to do that ever since I saw the theme announced. I winced at it, then thought of Wild Kingdom and relaxed. Do some typically Robert nature piece and just mention Wild Kingdom to say hello to the theme and that's it. But when I got down to doing it, that's when it affected what I did. Instead of my usual close-up on an animal, I wound up doing an entire panoramic scene with very small distant animals in it. I did a sky with the idea of distant mountains as the next layer down, and then the mountains took over the painting, which was very cool and also influenced by Bill Alexander's "Magic of Oil Painting."
Heh. If I still had wet oils out and hadn't cleaned the palette, I could've put some wet titanium white on an ACEO canvas board and tried doing a miniature Bob Ross or Bill ALexander painting with teeny brushes and a 1/4" flat for the Almighty Brush. I'll do that sometime but do not think I want to create that mess with less than six hours to go before my personal Write-A-Thon starts. Maybe that's what I'll do in the middle of the month for my Themed Swap card, really surprise someone on the swap list with a dramatic oil painting instead of something cartoon derived for "The Addams Family."
The other freaky weird Not Robertish thing that I did to this latest ACEO watercolour was to ignore my usual "Must Have All The Colours" colour fussiness and finally dare a palette suggested by the Winsor & Newton website's excellent ebook on colour mixing. Yes, I have just shifted to British spelling for tone, enjoy. I studied this ebook before purchasing any tubes of Winsor & Newton Artist Watercolour other than Opera Rose, which I bought in a tube because Blick didn't get the half pans in after six months of "we'll send it as soon as we get it in stock."
I have known for years and years that theoretically you could mix any colours you wanted from a good set of mixing primaries. However, I have had mud and disappointing results whenever I tried mixed secondary colours, even with Winsor & Newton Cotman Watercolours. This is because Alizarin Crimson is a muted purplish red, not a bright purplish red, and it's in every set of pan watercolours because of its very deep value range. It makes splendid mixed black. It is a very useful colour. It does not make bright pink, bright purple or anything like that. It does grayed muted versions of those colours.
Winsor & Newton's ebook on colour mixing completely ignored that pigment.
They recommend buying the best quality watercolours you can afford and choosing a smaller palette over lots of cheap colours. There are good reasons this is true. If you can only afford three tubes, they recommend Permanent Rose, Winsor Lemon and French Ultramarine, available both in their good Cotman student/university grade paint and their top quality Artist Watercolour.
Well, that made sense to me, since I always got good purples mixing pink highlighters with blue highlighters. Permanent Rose might make purple rather than grey. I spent happy months daydreaming on the Winsor & Newton website and the Blick website and then got the last actual Hand Painted Colour Chart available for their Artist Watercolour that Blick had left to give away for free. Blick loves me. I bought thirteen tubes in a carefully chosen Robert-Palette based on the hues and textures in the hand painted colour chart and the suggestions on the W&N site and was welded to Winsor & Newton for watercolour till a friend turned me on to Daniel Smith. Of course the top of that list of colours were the six primaries Winsor & Newton recommended for extended colour mixing. The three mentioned plus Scarlet Lake, Winsor Yellow and Pthalo Blue Green Shade (which I loved anyway).
A couple of days ago I had a low energy sick day and instead of painting anything serious, just colour charted my Winsor & Newton tubes in the nice watercolour journal kkitten42 gave me for my birthday one year. I used my last two cheap plastic ten-well covered palettes to set out good dollops of all the W&N Artist watercolours a few days before that, putting nine of the colours in one and all the Mixing Primaries together in the other so that I could grab just one palette or open them both or combine them with Daniel Smith in the same paintings.
Today while warming up to do "Wild Kingdom" knowing it had to be today and no later, I finally decided to try using just Permanent Rose, Winsor Lemon and French Ultramarine. I was expecting to be able to at least approximate all the secondary colours and get some neutrals out of it. I honestly did not expect to get good darks though, since none of the component colours really seem to go all the way to black. I was wrong. It worked. To the point that if I'd pushed one brown mix just a little farther I could approximate Alizarin Crimson getting both its hue and how dark it comes out laid on thick.
So that's a personal discovery of something anyone who owns any watercolour book knows already. You can mix the primaries to get all the hues you want including the secondaries, tertiaries and all the neutrals in all their values. You just need to use the right primaries to do it. Testing the Daniel Smith Primary Triad set worked in the colour wheel perfectly, with such well balanced primaries that I got bright orange, bright green and bright purple all from the same three. Lemon and Ultramarine make decent greens but not as bright as the Pthalo Blue Green Shade will because Ultramarine is just slightly purplish -- it really shows up in the turquoise and blue-greens.
But the threesome worked out just fine for a nature scene that did not have jungle greenery. I might use all six Winsor & Newton colours for the Jacques Cousteau Documentaries ACEO, since Pthalo Blue Green Shade is wonderful with yellow for every turquoise or blue-green or true green or yellow-green you can name, but the Permanent Rose and Ultramarine purples are vivid and the Scarlet Lake plus Pthalo Blue Green Shade purples are grey.
What I'm thinking now is that Winsor & Newton could go one step smaller than their eight pan Mini for a pocket watercolour set if they went with that primary triad and Winsor Green (pthalo) Blue Shade. That'd be enough for any hue needed, giving the actual green for mixing tropical bright greens and turquoise hues. Or do a six colour Primaries Mixing Set in a sketchers box sort of set. It's odd that they never included Permanent Rose in any of the smaller sets I ever bought in either grade, when it mixes so much better than the Alizarin Crimson. Is it just tradition or just strange that they recommend one thing using tubes and another using pans?
Or is it that they think of artists using pans as doing less mixing in general than those using tubes? But in their Cotman twelve colours sets, they never include Ivory Black so they expect students to learn to mix black or do without it in learning watercolour.
Heh, if I get good enough to write a watercolour book and wind up putting together a Robert Sloan Palette, I can always remedy the gap by making sure some form of rose, fuchsia or other purple-cast strong deep pink like a process red is included in the set. It's too useful even if Alizarin Crimson looks like fresh venous blood and comes out so gorgeous on certain dark red roses.
Every month there's a Theme Week and I usually do the art on the 1st of the month. However, because I will be pounding on the last third of my Three Day Novel on the first, I can't do my usual Theme Week $4.99 contest special ACEOs. So, because I don't like missing Theme Week either, I painted one of them today.
But you don't get to see it yet, not till the first when it's an active listing on eBay. I slept till one in the afternoon after staying up till seven in the morning -- a solid six hours of sleep that left me rested and optimistic with plenty of daylight left for Last Minute Art that is actually due before midnight tonight or just won't be created. I now have one Theme Week watercolor ACEO finished and drying.
I used some fairly wet techniques on it so it's going to take a while to dry completely before I dare plop it onto the scanner. TW's theme for September is "Favorite TV Show or Movie."
Er... right. This from the man who doesn't watch television for years at a time and only watches movies if kkitten42 rents them. But I thought back and realized my tastes were set during the summers as a little kid -- nature documentaries. So my ACEO is a nature scene that's a tribute to "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom." I think the theme was actually favorite childhood TV or movie or I'd be thinking of doing some tribute to the BBC Walking With series.
I knew I was going to do that ever since I saw the theme announced. I winced at it, then thought of Wild Kingdom and relaxed. Do some typically Robert nature piece and just mention Wild Kingdom to say hello to the theme and that's it. But when I got down to doing it, that's when it affected what I did. Instead of my usual close-up on an animal, I wound up doing an entire panoramic scene with very small distant animals in it. I did a sky with the idea of distant mountains as the next layer down, and then the mountains took over the painting, which was very cool and also influenced by Bill Alexander's "Magic of Oil Painting."
Heh. If I still had wet oils out and hadn't cleaned the palette, I could've put some wet titanium white on an ACEO canvas board and tried doing a miniature Bob Ross or Bill ALexander painting with teeny brushes and a 1/4" flat for the Almighty Brush. I'll do that sometime but do not think I want to create that mess with less than six hours to go before my personal Write-A-Thon starts. Maybe that's what I'll do in the middle of the month for my Themed Swap card, really surprise someone on the swap list with a dramatic oil painting instead of something cartoon derived for "The Addams Family."
The other freaky weird Not Robertish thing that I did to this latest ACEO watercolour was to ignore my usual "Must Have All The Colours" colour fussiness and finally dare a palette suggested by the Winsor & Newton website's excellent ebook on colour mixing. Yes, I have just shifted to British spelling for tone, enjoy. I studied this ebook before purchasing any tubes of Winsor & Newton Artist Watercolour other than Opera Rose, which I bought in a tube because Blick didn't get the half pans in after six months of "we'll send it as soon as we get it in stock."
I have known for years and years that theoretically you could mix any colours you wanted from a good set of mixing primaries. However, I have had mud and disappointing results whenever I tried mixed secondary colours, even with Winsor & Newton Cotman Watercolours. This is because Alizarin Crimson is a muted purplish red, not a bright purplish red, and it's in every set of pan watercolours because of its very deep value range. It makes splendid mixed black. It is a very useful colour. It does not make bright pink, bright purple or anything like that. It does grayed muted versions of those colours.
Winsor & Newton's ebook on colour mixing completely ignored that pigment.
They recommend buying the best quality watercolours you can afford and choosing a smaller palette over lots of cheap colours. There are good reasons this is true. If you can only afford three tubes, they recommend Permanent Rose, Winsor Lemon and French Ultramarine, available both in their good Cotman student/university grade paint and their top quality Artist Watercolour.
Well, that made sense to me, since I always got good purples mixing pink highlighters with blue highlighters. Permanent Rose might make purple rather than grey. I spent happy months daydreaming on the Winsor & Newton website and the Blick website and then got the last actual Hand Painted Colour Chart available for their Artist Watercolour that Blick had left to give away for free. Blick loves me. I bought thirteen tubes in a carefully chosen Robert-Palette based on the hues and textures in the hand painted colour chart and the suggestions on the W&N site and was welded to Winsor & Newton for watercolour till a friend turned me on to Daniel Smith. Of course the top of that list of colours were the six primaries Winsor & Newton recommended for extended colour mixing. The three mentioned plus Scarlet Lake, Winsor Yellow and Pthalo Blue Green Shade (which I loved anyway).
A couple of days ago I had a low energy sick day and instead of painting anything serious, just colour charted my Winsor & Newton tubes in the nice watercolour journal kkitten42 gave me for my birthday one year. I used my last two cheap plastic ten-well covered palettes to set out good dollops of all the W&N Artist watercolours a few days before that, putting nine of the colours in one and all the Mixing Primaries together in the other so that I could grab just one palette or open them both or combine them with Daniel Smith in the same paintings.
Today while warming up to do "Wild Kingdom" knowing it had to be today and no later, I finally decided to try using just Permanent Rose, Winsor Lemon and French Ultramarine. I was expecting to be able to at least approximate all the secondary colours and get some neutrals out of it. I honestly did not expect to get good darks though, since none of the component colours really seem to go all the way to black. I was wrong. It worked. To the point that if I'd pushed one brown mix just a little farther I could approximate Alizarin Crimson getting both its hue and how dark it comes out laid on thick.
So that's a personal discovery of something anyone who owns any watercolour book knows already. You can mix the primaries to get all the hues you want including the secondaries, tertiaries and all the neutrals in all their values. You just need to use the right primaries to do it. Testing the Daniel Smith Primary Triad set worked in the colour wheel perfectly, with such well balanced primaries that I got bright orange, bright green and bright purple all from the same three. Lemon and Ultramarine make decent greens but not as bright as the Pthalo Blue Green Shade will because Ultramarine is just slightly purplish -- it really shows up in the turquoise and blue-greens.
But the threesome worked out just fine for a nature scene that did not have jungle greenery. I might use all six Winsor & Newton colours for the Jacques Cousteau Documentaries ACEO, since Pthalo Blue Green Shade is wonderful with yellow for every turquoise or blue-green or true green or yellow-green you can name, but the Permanent Rose and Ultramarine purples are vivid and the Scarlet Lake plus Pthalo Blue Green Shade purples are grey.
What I'm thinking now is that Winsor & Newton could go one step smaller than their eight pan Mini for a pocket watercolour set if they went with that primary triad and Winsor Green (pthalo) Blue Shade. That'd be enough for any hue needed, giving the actual green for mixing tropical bright greens and turquoise hues. Or do a six colour Primaries Mixing Set in a sketchers box sort of set. It's odd that they never included Permanent Rose in any of the smaller sets I ever bought in either grade, when it mixes so much better than the Alizarin Crimson. Is it just tradition or just strange that they recommend one thing using tubes and another using pans?
Or is it that they think of artists using pans as doing less mixing in general than those using tubes? But in their Cotman twelve colours sets, they never include Ivory Black so they expect students to learn to mix black or do without it in learning watercolour.
Heh, if I get good enough to write a watercolour book and wind up putting together a Robert Sloan Palette, I can always remedy the gap by making sure some form of rose, fuchsia or other purple-cast strong deep pink like a process red is included in the set. It's too useful even if Alizarin Crimson looks like fresh venous blood and comes out so gorgeous on certain dark red roses.