Warm and Cool

I decided to start with the basics: colors. I like to jump right into things, so I never took the time to make up a chart of the colors from my Winsor & Newton Studio Set (24 pans). Now I'm learning that I really do need to start at square one: color mixing.







I've always been irritated with how bright and diluted these watercolors are--I tend to like more subdued and intense colors. These are inexpensive paints (Cotman) so I can't expect too much!

I learned I have problems consistently controlling the paint/water ratio to get nice squares. Watercolor is challenging!

There we are--all 24 paint colors for your pleasure, labeled "warm" "medium" and "cool". Learning about combining warm and cool colors was quite a revelation to me. I'd always gone about my business, mixing as I pleased making a nice big mess. In fact, look at how messy my squares are--I admire people who have a natural knack for the neat, not my strong suit, but there is something so beautiful about constraint and order.

It took a long ass time to do all of these little dots. But I'm green with pleasure because, well, look at all the greens I can make! On the left are my two "warm" blues, mixed with my yellows, and on the right are my "cool" and "medium" blues. Using cool blues you can get away with more green as you get deeper into the reds, but with the warm blues you can only get down to about cadium yellow before they start going olive/brown. I discovered I prefer the cool yellow + warm blues best, followed by warm yellows + cool blues. Cool + cool is too bright, while warm + warm is too muddied. Again, mind blowing!!

So messy.....but don't these remind you of those edible dot candies stuck on paper?

Art as healing therapy, one day a time

My health is finally stable enough, more or less, to give this daily art project another go. In fact, I consider it part of my healing process. At times over the past year I've felt absolutely no creativity at all, and fatigue aside it was the most frustrating thing. Now it's starting to nip at my heels and that's a clear sign I'm feeling better! Each idea deserves to be explored, or at least written down......now I need to learn techniques to realize their potential!

I think my first goal (aside from simply building the habit of daily art) will be to get through, cover to cover, three instruction books in watercolor. At the same time I'd like to start working on character sketches for some stories I've been working on, since I often get different ideas by drawing than by writing. For example, I started learning how to draw a hippo last year (see "older posts" at bottom of page) in preparing for a story about Gertrude, the hippo my parents owned in the 1970's.

This was done in October while trying to copy a sunset in a Claudia Nice book. Difficult, and needs a second go!



I'm working on a story that starts on a farm, and I've always been partial to chickens....
Let's see if I actually do something more than a doodle tomorrow....