Practicing with Two Colors

I picked up a few true oil colors after doing a lot of reading on how best to use the solvents needed for cleaning. I found that Turpenoid Natural is a pretty safe and very low odor brush cleaning medium, and did a pretty good job of both cleaning my brushes and not making the kids run in fear of the smells coming from the dining room table.

For this painting I used just french ultramarine, burnt sienna and white, which is slightly different from my last two color work here, where I used phthalo blue instead of the ultramarine. As you can see, the 'greens' here are a bit darker as ultramarine leans towards the redder side of the blues.

Peppers

Last week I was sitting in Connie's kitchen waiting for her kids to get home from school. Sitting on the countertop by the window was a bowl of fruits and vegetables with the sunlight dropping down on them. Grabbing my watercolor pencils, I got to work. I didn't finish in time as the bus soon pulled up.

As I had started with the orange pepper first and worked my way to the left, the whole composition definately leans to the left. I think it looks better this way than had I done it more level. I also like the brightness of the colors but I need to work on generating deeper contrasts with the watercolor pencils. What you think is dark enough really fades once you bring on the water.

Doodle Bird

I just recently got a new Wacom Pen tablet and here is a quick doodle I did using the supplied Corel Painter Essentials program. I'm still learning the program, but it's been delightful to use (I do recommend it as an inexpensive digitizing device) and the kids have had a blast making drawings for the refridgerator.

Bird and Berries

I really do enjoy working with my watercolor pencils. Just watching the color blossom as the brush goes on is a thrill for me.

Matt on the River

A few weeks ago I got a chance to head down to part of the Wisconsin River with my friend Matt. He wanted to fish and I wanted to do some 'plein air' painting (painting outdoors). So while he was catching bluegills, I had my folding chair and sat in the shade painting away. I was glad I had made those swatches of color I've posted about earlier. They were a great help in helping determine what colors the background trees were and which shade of blue the sky. It was a good exercise for me, as a lot of my drawing and painting I do from my imagination and this helped me work on seeing the colors as they actually are.

Matt caught eight fish.

Working on textures

My latest project has me practicing the layering of color. I'm attempting to get smooth gradients from lighter to darker shades, with only occasional success, by layering successive washes of color onto the previous ones.

My palette probably has too many colors for this painting, but I wanted to get a good diversity of color for the rock wall. The viridian tree on the right doesn't seem to match the intensity of the rest of the painting. I think I'll need to work on the shadows more and increase the contrast to make the lighter parts pop more.

Tale of Two Ceruleans

One of the more interesting things I've learned while getting back into painting is the concept of pigments instead of colors. As you can see from the color swatches I made from two Cerulean Blue paints - the one on the left from M. Graham and the one on the right from Winsor & Newton - that they're not quite the same.

Investigating this more, I find that the pigments that make up the paints are different. The paint from Winsor and Newton uses pigment PB35 which is actual Cerulean Blue. The paint on the left from M.Graham is pigment PB36 which is Cobalt Chromite Blue Green Spinel! The difference is that true Cerulean Blue pigment is very granular and you can see the rough surface it creates on the paper on the right. This granularity was 'solved' by M. Graham by using a different material all together.

Though I have to wonder why they used the Cerulean Blue name, perhaps because it's much more recognizable!