Playing with Paint

When I was originally investigating watercolors, I was taught to make swatches of color mixes. Friday, I got some more paint colors (Golden) so I decided to go ahead and do three swatch pages: yellows and blues (greens), reds and yellows (oranges), and reds and blues (purples). This was a very unscientific process where I made charts and mixed each pair approximately 50/50. I tried to vary the mixes a bit and paint multiple different mixes in each pair; some colors, like the phthalos, I had to stray from the 50/50 ratio fairly drastically to get close to the target color. This was a very interesting and useful process because now I have a permanent record that will tell me which colors to use to mix a wide variety of secondary colors. I also learned which primary colors make good secondaries and which do not (Pyrrole Red does not make good purples, but makes nice oranges, for instance). If you haven't tried this with your paints, I recommend it....it's tremendously educational and also fun.

Wishing for Mad Camera Skillz =-)

For some reason I am having the best time painting and the worst time with the camera. Yes, the new one. Sigh. Part of the problem is that they paint is glare-ey. It's all my fault, because the paints I prefer are the glittery, glitzy, glowy ones. So I'm paying a price for my magpie tendencies. To make matters worse, I had to go and glue stuff onto the abstract. I am so happy with how it turned out. I'm thinking of naming it Turmoil after the recent tornadoes that have plagued Illinois--it does have that spiral aspect (can you tell with all the glare?). Then there is the unicorn, which looks pretty surreal with the glare that is on it; in person it looks a little sloppy around the edges (because I am still in the process of developing my brush-handling skills, which are in their beginning stages). However, it looks less anemic than it did before I plumped out the belly of the unicorn. I think maybe I made the butterflies too brightly colored; do they detract from the unicorn? I have a lot to learn.....but at least I'm having a good time with it.