Happy New Growth

 Um, so if you leave tomatoes sitting on the counter and they get covered with holiday presents, sometimes they don't go rotten.

These ones grew.

A nice reminder we are half way out of the dark and spring is coming.  Be warned.  

Farmlife photos

 Just some colourful farmlife photos.  It would be fun to paint these one day.

Hobbit for the holidays

 

Another in the hobbit hole series with the limited palette handmade paints.

This guy is only three inches tall but packs a punch.  

Happy Holidays

 

I've been following youtube tutorials - sort of - and the limited Zorn Palette in handmade watercolours.

Occasionally, I add a bit of the winter nights blue with sparkles when I can't get a green just right.

My favourite is the hot chocolate.  

This might be a mistake

 Possibly the beginning of the end of gelly gouache for me.  

Poor chicken.

But festive. 

Beautiful hen

 A friends chicken but for some reason, I just had to paint it. It's a comfort thing now.

I probably would have eaten chocolate instead if I had any in the house.  But I'm glad I painted a chicken instead.

Regular watercolours, a mix of student and professional.

I just love the way she glows. 

Perhaps something more Shire

 

I'm playing with a new limited palette which is very like the one I created from beam paints only this time from commercial paints in tubes that I can pour into a more portable palette.  

Caput Mortuum, Indigo, and Hansa.  I feel the need to add a green to this, but haven't found one I like yet.  But it can do a lot more than I expected with just those colours.

But still, something's missing.  So I added some lines with a dip pen and trying out sumi ink.

I like this much better

I don't always get it right

 I like to imagine that I get it right more often than not, but um... maybe it's closer to 50/50.

By "right" means that it's the best I can do with my current skillset and feel good about it.

Today's disaster is of a local folly and waterwheel in Himi Gelly Gouache.  It's really sad that I even used a protractor to get the angles right.  Although looking at it now, I can see some of the error is from the post concussion vision issues that won't go away.  

Hobbit happy

 Yesterday I shared my new limited palette of handmade watercolours.

This little sample of watercolour paper is 3x4" and for the longest time I couldn't figure out what to paint that small.  

Small

hobbit sized?

My own Shire palette from handmade Beam Paints

The more I explore Beam Paints, the more I love what they can do.  

I want to stress that these are NOT like mass manufactured paints.  These naturally sourced pigments tend to be heavy and have some very interesting behaviour.  

I've been using my Zorn palette for a while now, but decided to try another limited colour palette.

I've also included white in this.  It's probably the one colour I'm most disappointed with as it's a problem to activate.  It sucks up all the water and gives me almost nothing back.  It's fine if I paint with it for a few days in a row, but trying to wake it up... it resists.

But it's useful to make the paints differently opaque when needed.  Well worth exploring what we can do with it.

 

The angry gardener

 So I got something wrong.  She's never this annoyed.  But I do like playing with indigo for the background.  

Every painting is practice and a step towards getting better.  I learn something every time.

Washing the gardener

 She's Gardener because she's the only one cheeky enough to sneak into the garden and dig up my plants.  

Personally, I think she just wants the hug

Regular watercolours.  Nothing special about that.  But I love the way the first wash behaves as it dries.  It's still wet here.  The "drying shift" of watercolours is fun to watch, but also increases the challenge.  

himi gouache eh? But can it paint a chicken?

 

A kind of chicken, yes.

I used ink for the line work and himi gouache for the colours.  There's a charm about him, but also he's too generic to be a chicken I know.  

I forgot

 His closeup

Considering I don't know how to paint people yet, I really like how this turned out.  Five colours it all it takes (and some gold)

Beam handmade watercolour paints - it feels like The Holidays have begun already

 

For santa, I'm using the Zorn palette I talked about before, and Beam Paints.  This time I'm adding Winter Nights as it has some sparkle and I was having trouble getting greens I liked for the holly.

Have a look at how it swatches and mixes with the other colours

Still very subdued but that's exactly what I want.  

One thing I love about zorn colours is it's a very classic movie look for us.  We learn about limited colour palettes by watching TV and films.  And have you noticed if something is set in War Time England, the urban scenes almost always follow the zorn palette so any touch of green or blue really stands out?  Foils War is a good example.  

Zorn is classic in our zeitgeist.  

I kind of like how we can use colours to pull up old programming in our brains.  And sparkles.  

I may have "accidently" added some gold in there too but that qualifies as a kind of yellow ochre, right?

It's that time again.

 

Santa begins.

These are some handmade watercolour paints from Beam Paints and their pre-black friday sale (their mailing list lets you know the sales)

More on that next day.