Swatches

I've ben working recently on making swatches of my watercolor paints. In my reading of different painting books and articles, they all mention learning the properties of the paints you have. Which ones are more transparent, which ones are more granulating and how they change with the ratio of water to paint. So I drew up 1" x 6" strips and got painting. Starting with the outside and working in, I doubled the amount of water for each square.

It was interesting to learn how much water is needed for the different pigments to make them the brightest. If you look and see the Quinacridone Gold on the right, you can see that it goes from a very mottled dark gold to a very pretty creamy gold with just the addtion one drop of water! The Lamp black shows to be a very strong pigment as well, needing a lot of water to bring it down into the neutral gray area. The Viridian shows how granulating some of the paints can be even with a lot of water.

This was a lot of fun to paint. I punched holes at the ends and looped them all into an old keychain for easy management.

Blue and Purple

I put this one together for Connie's birthday a few weeks ago. I'm still trying to get a feel for different paint strengths and how to overlay washes of color. In watercolors you can get a lot of different effects depending on how dry the lower levels of paint are and how loaded with paint your brush is. I'm having trouble spotting the difference between slightly damp and almost dry and really dry. I think it'll come to me eventually with practice and patience.

I came across a new paper that I wanted to try for this. It's a very thick poster board material with a watercolor paper surface. It didn't buckle like unstretched watercolor paper normally does, but it did have a slight bow when I was done that I needed to flatten. I used Cerulean blue, Pthalo blue and Dioxazine purple paint.

I think I want to do some color charts next. I feel like I need to play with the paints to see what each paint does with different amounts of water.