Trick or Treat

 

You know how I worried I bought the wrong colours in the last post?

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?  

deceptive handmade watercolours

 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?  

I wonder, how about this limited palette?

 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) 

Forever handsome

He used to have the most beautiful comb!  But alas, he's not the wisest when it comes to battle.  But the hens love him and that's what counts in the end.  

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?)

Handsome grows stronger

 

The thing about watercolours is layers.

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.  

Here's a handsome fella

 So named after Handsome Cowboy from a movie I love.

You know the one, right?

(and yes, I'm fishing for comments to see if anyone is out there in the void)

Paint stones

 

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.  

 

The big question is, of course,

 

Can I paint a chicken with the Zorn limited Palette and watercolours? 

More lofi girl watercolours just in time for winter

 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. 

Lofi Girl goes Zorn

 Still playing with the Zorn limited colour palette, I wondered if I could paint something from this lofi girl video.

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.

beam handmade paints and zorn

Trying something new with the Beam Paints handmade watercolours and a limited zorn palette.

The closest colours I could get are Harvest (yellow Ochre), Mars Black, and Turtle Belly.  I really like how these work together and can get quite a range.

Although for this one, I used Graphite instead of Mars and it didn't get as dark.

 

Zorn and japanese watercolour samuri

 

They say Kurataki Gansai Tambi is a mix between watercolour and gouache so I thought it would be fun to try a zorn limited palette painting.

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.  

A wizard and zorn watercolours

 

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.  

Gandalf was okay, I guess

But I wonder if I can paint him better?  

I don't have a wizzard or wizard hat.  But I have this wool felt one.  Some coffee and attempting to paint it in black (no white this time).

That kind of worked.  I wonder what else I have around the house to try? 

Painting from life, I learn a lot more than from a picture or screen shot.  A bit of driftwood, some wool cloth, and now I'm about to attempt some cotswold wool locks.  

I am amazed by what watercolour and looking at something really hard can achieve.  I really like these little studies.

 

speaking about wizards

 I wondered how hard it would be to paint one using the Zorn palette

Why Zorn when the four colours (white, yellow ochre, bright red/orange, and black) have been used by many traditional arts around the world?  From Haida Gwaii, the Cowichan, and other First Peoples from the area where I live, to India, China, Italy, Africa... all over the world, we see these four colours making up a traditional palette.  And rightly so, they are fantastic! 

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?