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A painting from the cafe window and two made up landscapes, to test drive this watercolour selection and see if it’s missing anything.
I love how warm the greens can be despite my palette having cobalt teal AND cobalt turquoise! And the granulation is really working for me.
I do miss having a near-black blue or green – anthraquinone or prussian blue, or perylene green – but it is fun finding other ways to get those deep darks. It’s definitely making me use my purple more, and I do love what purple does to green.
Probably the biggest thing missing from this palette is a saturated middle yellow. I have lemon yellow deep, which is very cold and quite pale, and I have Mijello Mission Gold’s green gold, PY150, which is warm in masstone (full power) and quite cold and intense in dilution (watered down). My only warm wash colour is raw sienna. It is giving things kind of a cool cast even to the yellow light in that middle landscape sketch; that might honestly be a nice technique to use for a palette destined for outdoor painting. We’ll see!
These were all painted in my lightwish 100% cotton watercolour sketchbook, and you can see I have a hard time getting crisp small details in here. I think there’s two reasons: firstly, the paper holds SO much water, it takes much longer than I expect to dry (this is also a feature, if you want to control and modify washes at length); and secondly, I’m testing this palette with waterbrushes, and it’s very hard to control the water enough to get dark rich sticky mixes that are JUST liquid enough to lay down smoothly. I don’t particularly think the paper itself is at fault as much as my technique. BUT. Something I’m noting and thinking about.
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I’ve been enjoying sketching with the neocolours over a base layer or ink or paint, so today I threw a bunch into my bag of crayola mini markers that I normally save for visiting my friends and family with kids1. Markers + neocolour iis in the very cheap, light, portable sketch books you can get at Muji turns out to be very fun!
I included a shot of my swatches; one of the things I find challenging about the kids markers is that they almost never include any truly light or pale colours. One of the things I’ve learned about the neocolour iis is that they really look their best when layered over a midtone. Together, these problems become a feature!
These are certainly not the world’s best cars; this is a sketchbook page done for fun while onthe phone. But maybe you, seeing this, are thinking about some supplies you have that might work really well together? And if so you should go try that and let me know what you learn!
- Kids will always want to draw if I’m drawing, it’s usually worth it to bring them some friendly supplies I won’t be stressed about sharing. ↩︎
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For this one i used all my oil pastels, from the hardest to the stickiest to the softest. The grain of the canvas panel was filled in very quickly and because all the pastels besides sennelier are so opaque, i feel like i lost some of the vibrancy I’d found in the strawberry earlier. However, still life is a wonderfully fun way to treat out and push your skills in a new medium and i can’t recommend it enough!
Also, man, studying ripe tomatoes on the vine from my snowy window seat in February is an exercise in… something. Sitting with unfulfilled cravings maybe.
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i have footnote capabilities already!1 Ahh, the newly distracting ways I can write, unfolding before my like cells in the library of babel…2 Unfortunately I am already not to be trusted with most punctuation; I will resist all efforts to simplify my sentences, and I WILL nest (or embed3) too many clauses! Anyways, this has been fair warning4. Footnotes ensue.
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I’ve been thinking about how the sennelier oil pastels are so soft that you can get full on painting style soft and hard edges etc, and I picked up a few small canvas boards to see if they were a useful substrate for faking oil painting effects!
Unfortunately the sennelier pastels are so slippery that they really don’t grip the canvas at all, and it became hard to layer the way i wanted. but there is definitely still a painterliness to this that excites me! i think for my next try I’ll pay down a first pass with a much thicker, stickier oil pastel – haiyas or mungyos maybe – and see if that starts to fill in the weave and give the developers more to bond with when i get to that layer.
One of the challenges of oil pastels, at least for me, has been finding a medium with the right absorbency, texture, grip, etc. I haven’t been that big a fan of the pastelmat I’ve tried – even before i had softer oil pastels, things seemed to build up to an unmanageable amount of greasiness too quickly for me, due to the inabsorbency of the sanded paper.
Unprimed wood, heavy cotton bristol, and cotton rag printmaking paper have been the most successful for me so far. The wood gives me some texture while still having a little absorbency; the bristol is utterly smooth but again, the pastel does set a little on it as it absorbs the oil; and the heavy cotton rag paper seems to absorb an incredible amount of the oil from the pastels while usually still having a decent rough or cold press texture to offer my markmaking. if anything, because of how dry it renders my oil pastels, it’s been the least blendable by far.
So i should probably go back to the cotton rag soon and see what that level of control gets me with the sennelier oil pastels; but I’m intrigued by this canvas potential and I’ll probably do another still life on a canvas board first!
oh, technical note: these canvas boards are all pre-gessoed rough canvas, making them very unabsorbent and giving them a large resolution weave texture. Maybe it would be worth trying a linen canvas? or an unprimed canvas with more squish?
Also, going through my photo collection, i think i could paint still life strawberries every day for the rest of the winter and not run out of reference. Is this a good idea? is there any chance someone might want to own an oil pastel drawing of a strawberry someday? there’s only so many i can hang up in my own home…
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I got this set of Kuretake Gansai Tambi in the fall and day down to play with them in my etchr sketchbook this week. The 100% cotton paper that usually is my best friend, however, felt less useful with these than with my usual watercolours.
which isn’t to say i didn’t have fun! the colour range of the set is great and the vibrancy is *amazing*.
but i realized i really don’t know much about these paints besides the fact that they’re at least a little different from Western style watercolours; so i did some googling, and i thought I’d share some highlights:
a great breakdown of the actual chemical differences:
a great demo of how they can be pushed far beyond what you think in terms of layering and vibrancy:
They sound like a product related to traditional paint prep methods for nihonga, which is painted on washi paper :
Nihonga – Wikipediathis playlist is a very clear overview of nihonga materials:
Nihonga Tutorial Playlist
these days they seem very strongly associated with etagami, which I’m just starting to research:
In summary, no, they definitely don’t work like my Daniel Smith or Mijello or Holbein watercolours, but that’s because they’re very definitely not the same thing. I’m excited to play around with the paints in combo with different materials and see what they unlock for me!
Also, god, I’m already tempted to get more; they really do have a jewel-like quality, shining in those big flat pans….
(i did rearrange them into this colour wheel order to help me learn the palette, if you noticed the labels in the box no longer line up with the colours)
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new watercolour palette
posted:
updated:
posted to: arttagged: art supplies, art toolkit, colours, folio palette, palette, plein air, structure, watercolourTreated my birthday self to an Art Toolkit Folio Palette! It’s both big and small, with lots of mixing space, even though it packs up very slim and weighs very little; and it magnets to itself and to whatever I want to stick it to for painting. While the -14C snowy weather here in Southern Ontario is not going to have me doing much plein air this month, I think my future self will really enjoy taking this to the beach, the park, etc!
(I also picked up an extra mixing pan to swap out for two of the larger square pans; I already appreciate the extra space, as I am a messy, chaotic mixer.)
In good timing, I also finished swatching all my watercolours onto cards, so I used them to assemble myself a palette of tube paints to fill this with:
I went heavy on the granulating paints; if this is a plein air landscape and urban sketching palette, then it doesn’t need as much texture control as one I might take figure drawing. I got to include a few of my newer tubes, too, to really test run them in a more focused way:
- Lemon Yellow Deep (W&N)
- Perylene Scarlet (DS)
- Terre Verte (DS) (I picked this up because the Winsor & Newton terre verte I own is probably the palest, weakest paint I own and yet I adore the colour, so i was hoping for just a more powerful version thereof; sadly the Daniel Smith one is a totally different colour and pigment composition, but turns out I also love IT, so~)
- Olive Green (SH PWC)
- Mars Black (W&N)
The yellow, scarlet and black listed are all notably granulating versions of those colours, so I am excited to see what kind of unhinged texture I can lay out on the page with this palette!
I’ve started doing some sketchbook studies to test drive it and while I think I might have made a mistake omitting my perylene green, maybe that kind of challenge is good for me!
I will say, the mixing area on this palette is velvety and perfect. I have never had a palette be such a joy to mix on out of the box – the paint spreads usefully on it in a way I have enormous trouble conditioning my enameled metal or plastic palettes into achieving literally ever! It’s raised the bar for me and whoops, now I have higher standards.
What do you think of these colours? Do you have a beloved palette you have conditioned into perfection? Are you also dreaming of sitting under a tree and painting in a few months?
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Astronomics! It’s out! You can play it! I’ve spoken a bit about this previously but this is my first published Art Direction credit and you can bet it means a lot to me! You should go look at the steam page and see how hecking charming this game turned out:
Also, you can take a look at the slick announcement trailer they made:
Important note: Hube & the team at Numizmatic have released the game as an early access game on steam, but don’t let that fool you – this is already a big game, with gameplay from start to finish available and an incredible number of possible asteroids to encounter, thanks to the wonderful procedural asteroid design! They’ve published a roadmap for the next updates and more info on how they’re approaching early access on the game’s website.
And in wonderful news, people are really enjoying it! There are MULTIPLE enthusiastic review videos, and folks on steam are really singing its praises!
I definitely want to talk more about the experience of designing this game right at the start of its life, but I’ll save that for a later blog post. Meanwhile, let me leave you with the three main characters, to whom I am disproportionately attached:
look at him! look at this little guy!
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Gansai tambi paints and neocolor iis; a very fun combo! I am often sad about the difficulty of making watercolours create rich even dark washes, but the gansai tambi paints excel at it. The only tragedy is how glossy they come out if you go thick with them.
Neocolors lay down beautifully on them though, glossy or not, and as a test case I think this is a great proof of concept!
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Drawn without water, on a 6 x 9″ grey blue cardstock, I think Strathmore brand. Drawn from life, from a lovely birthday bouquet.
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