I don't know why, but tutorials are probably the worst way for me to learn. I feel like I'm copying a painting or even steps of a painting. I think I would do better if I could have the steps but work from life or a phot rather than follow someone else's painting.
Anyway, this never amounted to anything. It's also the wrong time of year to be thinking of cherry blossoms when I'm having to keep the frost off the humming bird feeders.
First time using caput mortuum (beautiful rich, granulating opaque watercolour, earth red) but I lost some of the glow so I used some gold paint to give him back some shine before the final layer.
I tried a thing, it kind of worked.
Well, it gets worse. This trio is secondary colours - what a crazy challenge I set myself to paint something with this.
Same lifting problems as last time. I tried to use it to my advantage, but I just couldn't get the deep darkness I wanted. Adding layers to make it darker, lifted the old layer and made it lighter. It's like opposite to what I would expect watercolours to do.
The reference I used for this is a photo I took a few years back in the local park. Dappled light through the leaves and a face that caves in on itself. Brilliant.
After Halloween, thousands of pumpkins, carved, melted, burnt, and rotting, appear in one of the local parks. It's a marvelous thing to see.
We like to pretend wildlife eats them all, but in reality the tax dollars clean them up. Money well spent. I wonder if the weather will let me go with my paint set instead of just a camera this year?
These should be so beautiful. I had such wonderful results buying handmade watercolour so far, that I thought I would try a different seller on etsy. They get great reviews.
They swatch beautifully!
Not sure this is quite cut out for a chicken. How about one of my other obsessions? A hobbit-ish house?
The first layer started off well. Blending is lovely. Got some good strong colour right away.
The problem comes with the next layer. See that window on the right. Smudge city.
The paint lifts like crazy. One layer painting is fine, but I like to layer. sigh. They feel like they aren't bonding to the paper like regular watercolours. Some watercolours lift a bit, but it usually needs more than a hint of water. These feel like they don't have enough binder. But maybe I just choose the wrong colours?
Again with the Beam Paints - more and more I fall in love with them. Lucky for me the price is about equal or less than most big name paints in the local art shops.
And my new favourite limited palette.
Timberwolf (paynes grey)
Mars (caput mortuum)
and Fall Popular (hansa yellow)
For this one, I included a bit of graphite, but meh. It's not the right addition to this trio.
(and yes, this is totally a variation on Handsome - glad you noticed. I use him to try out new colour combinations but mostly I give him back his comb points because poor fella)
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I think this is one of my favouite examples of how much personality handmade paints can add to the picture. I don't think I could get the feathers half way close without it.
Painting feathers are hard (is hard?)
Painting light to dark and using the natural texture of the paint to help discover the chicken.
Still, he would look better with a tail.
You know the one, right?
(and yes, I'm fishing for comments to see if anyone is out there in the void)
These cute little guys are paint stones. Handmade watercolour by Beam Paints.
(pro tip, sign up for their mailing list now as they have epic black friday sales)
Lightfast pigments, gum arabic, and Manitoulin maple sap blend together to create a handmade saturated colour that is a joy to paint with. From thick stripes to fine washes and details, quality is evident in every stroke. Our watercolours are shaped into paintstones, our version of a half-pan, before being wrapped in beeswaxed cloth. Our pans are packaged in slices of cedar and birch offcuts from an Indigenous sustainable lumber operation.
I adore the ethos of this paint maker. Ecological sound practices, plastic free packaging, a focus on safety, and the romantic names of the different colours.
Featured here are Mars Black, Turtle Belly red, Harvest Wheat (yellow ochre) and Limestone white. It makes a nice variation on the zorn palette.
Although I am having issues adjusting to these paints as they have so much more pigment than I'm used to working with the student grade watercolours. The paints also have personality that they contribute to the painting - much more than the big commercial brands.
Also a big thanks to Dad for making me a stand for my paints out of the wood from a branch from our apple tree.
A couple more lofi girl studies from the video I posted last time.
This first one is in Gansai Tambi paints and playing with backruns in the background.
This one is in my new favourite limited colour palette. More on that soon.
The colours worked, but the painting style is harder than I expected. I am not used to doing large areas of flat colour. It doesn't help that I'm still using that faulty paper, it shows up a lot in the skin and dark. But still, not bad.
The white is more opaque and powerful than regular watercolour white and I love how it interacts with the skin tone. So too is the black and when mixed with the red it makes some lovely browns.
Bonus points if you know what movie this is from. I wasn't brave enough to do his eyebrows big enough.
In many ways, I adore how this turned out. The granulation. The way the white pushes back his hat and cloak while the transparent watercolours in the staff make it almost glow.
What I didn't know, and is hard to see in this photo, is the paper had gone off. The sizing (the layer that protects the paper from the water) had decayed due to poor storage prior to the book shipping to me. You can see it most near the top of the staff where there's a white patch that didn't take the background colour and some places where it absorbed too much.
I ended up contacting the manufacturer and got a refund for the books (yes, I bought two). I'm still going to use these, but alas, not for the nice record keeping I was hoping for. This is going to be another practice journal.
In Ancient Greece, it was called the Apelles Palette, many Renaissance painters used a variation on it, only with the newly discovered vermillion. Anyway, there are about 36 hundred names for these four colours. But I can spell Zorn. So Zorn it is.
For this, I'm experimenting with white in watercolours and a couple of different blacks. Granulating mars black for the background and interesting how white can bring forward or push back certain subjects.
It's also around this time, I'm borrowing a lot of books from the library on the history of watercolour and discover that it's not until about 1960 that white became forbidden in watercolours.
I think teachers might have had trouble explaining/understanding that white and black aren't good at values - they don't lighten or darken colours well. In watercolour this is done with saturation (the amount of paint) more than anything. Since they couldn't explain/understand this, they forbid white (and black) in the classroom. And people took this to mean that all white and black are forbidden in watercolours.
I think that's a shame as these two can do amazing effects. Just look at some of the old masters from Turner, Constable, Van Gogh, Emily Car... none of them were afraid of white or "body colour" in their watercolours. Why are we?
And upgrading my paint box.
There are some colours I use a lot more like Burnt Sienna and Yellow Ochre, so they get more pans. I also left a special spot for Potters Pink as I would love to try that one day.
(these blog entries are coming in a bit out of order, but I hope to catch up to the current day in a few months)
-web-ready.jpg "and there's a chicken")
Painting that it's a doll is hard, so I just focused on the idea.
But also, something was missing, so I added some gold ink to his robe and stars
The second thing that must happen is a Wizzard! (comment if you know why it has two Z's)
Here our Wizzard is having a walk in the potato patch. He loves potatoes.
Only, it goes all wrong somehow.
Details on how Nicole made this mighty wizzard here.
this is me just showing off another needle felted chicken by fairy grove creations
And my other favourite thing - coffee!
(make note of how small that coffee plant is in the coffee bag, it comes back later)
To understand the next painting, two things must happen.
First, chickens!
This is needle felted henny penny! You can get your own epic chicken here.
It's amplifies what I love about watercolours - the paints participate in the creation. They flow and granulate adding texture and surprise.
A review from a new painter of HannahLouMyers handmade watercolours and a variation on the review I wrote here.
The magic of using good quality materials is something any craftsperson can relate to. Like carving a beautifully grown apple branch into a spoon or knitting with lovingly handspun yarn. Spaghetti sauce from homegrown tomatoes. The materials add a flavour to the final project that is more than knowing where our ingredients come from, it adds a feeling of life to the final creation.
So when I started learning how to paint this summer, I looked around for handmulled paints that would give this feeling to my paintings. Commercial paints are lovely, but they feel like the pigment is flat on the paper and it takes a lot from the artist to add that extra dimension to the painting. Thus the quest for handmulled paints began.
I suspect if I had spent as many hours painting as I did seeking out the perfect handmade paints, I would be a master painter by now. But I finally settled on HannahLouMyers' handmade paints on etsy and I am over-the-moon happy with these paints. (I just hope I'm worthy of them).
They look like handmade chocolates, but the inside is even better. I bought the set of 6 handmade watercolour half pans in a tin.
Okay, I want to stop here and say that these paints smell amazing. Like all the good memories of winter holidays in one tiny tin.
The ingredients include clove oil for preservation and honey to help the paint flow smoothly. Local honey! This is another reason why I choose this maker as the shop is just the next city over and they source many of their ingredients locally.
I hear you saying "alright already, but how does it paint?"
Before I decided what colours to get, I bought some dot cards. These are small mounds of watercolours on a bit of paper we can use for swatching. HannahLouMyers has generous size dots that I was not only able to see what the colour looks like, but to swatch and do some colour mixing to see which combination gave me the most versatile and useful palette.
I am really glad I got some dot cards first because I had no idea that paints could be so lively. It's not just the colour, but each paint has a personality it adds to the painting. Some of these paints are so textured you can feel it on the page and it makes the most marvellous effect. The thing is, I've only been painting for two months and I worried that my skill wasn't up for those paints... yet. So I chose some of the calmer paints.
The Colour Theory or Primary set has great mixing power so they were an obvious place to start. The more muted yellow and red (forsythia and maple) are very much like my most used colours of yellow ochre and burnt sienna. But different enough that I'm going to have fun learning what these paints can do. As for choosing brine... well, that was an oddball for me. Of all the colours I swatched, that was the one that sang to me most of all. I don't know why or how to use this colour but I just knew it would improve my painting if I tried it.
So, the next step is to swatch out a little cheat sheet for my tin until I can get to know the colours better.
I love this little set and the only big adjustment I've made is to add magnets to the bottom of the pans so they don't rattle around.
And a final comparison between commercially made paints and the hand mulled watercolours.
The commercial paints have the advantage of being consistent and predictable. But when I see them next to the handmade watercolours, the handmade paints look more lively and the commercial ones flat.
I'm very excited to try out these new paints, but I'm also worried that now I have them, I will be too afraid to use them because I'm not yet good enough. I need to find something too paint soon so I can get over the fear. There's no point having beautiful paints and not using them.
additional to the original review:
I love these paints and I especially like that they include pigment information. The pans are overflowing with paint and considering these are cheaper than commercial paints, I am definitely getting my money's worth.
What I didn't mention is how long shipping takes. I've had things arrive the same day from that city, but it usually takes 2 to 3 business days to get here. I'm very lucky if I get my order in under 3 weeks.
The paints are less consistent than commercial versions, but I kind of like that as these paints participate in the art instead of just sitting where I put them.
