So this week I decided to do some experiments with my watercolors. The results look like something a juvenile orangutan might paint. But that’s immaterial. Juvenile orangutans probably have a completely different creative motivation than I do, but I can only speak for myself, and the reason I made this series of messes was to experiment with color. While I’m no expert, I’ve found a few things to read on the subject. One is at handprint.com. It’s more of a textbook than a website, and I’ve barely dipped into it.
I have two books that I don’t have to take back to the library: James Toogood’s Incredible Light and Texture in Watercolor, and Joe Garcia’s The Watercolor Bible. I got both these books from Cheap Joe’s Art Stuff. I had already previewed Toogood’s book from the local library, and I knew I wanted it in my library. He explains how different manufacturers may give the same color (pigment) different names, but there is an industry standard designation for the actual pigments. So learning (or making a list of) those standard designation makes it easier to match paints from different paint makers. Who’d've thought? It certainly reduces my anxiety at the hobby store. Now if only the online catalogs would include that information for all their paints.
Garcia’s book has a lot of illustrations demonstrating various color blending techniques and philosophies. In my defense, some of his little “studies” look a lot like mine, although he tends to use straighter lines and blocks of color where I use squiggles and blobs. Oh, well. I’m not sure I got the results I was “supposed” to, and not what I expected, but see for yourself.
First layer of pure color washes
My first step was to use pure colors. I used Cadmium (Cad) Lemon next to Burnt Sienna across the top. All these colors are from my set of pan paints (shown here). In the middle I used Yellow Green and Emerald Green, with a little Carmine added wet on wet (the reddish bit in the middle of the green). I went down the left side with English Red, and across under the green with Scarlet and Carmine. The darker green at the bottom is Russian Green (these watercolors were made in St. Petersburg).
adding a glaze
The next step was to add a “glaze,” or a very watery wash, to see how it would change the other colors, or not. Everything had to be completely dry first, but I still picked up some of the original colors as I added the glaze. I used Cad Orange. You can also see where there was some additional color blending as the original washes dried — some of the red ran up into the green. “It’s alive!”
Anyway, the effect of the glaze seemed to be to just mute the other colors without making anything look more orange. I’m not sure I like glazes much.
playing with layers
Finally, I went back and tried adding a second wash of pure color over some areas — like Cobalt Blue over the yellow — to see how well the colors merged. Blue over yellow or yellow over blue is supposed to give green, but all I see is one color over another. My eyes completely separate the two colors. But maybe it’s because I painted them. If I mixed Cobalt with Cad Lemon, I got a real nice green, and there’s a blob of that next to the big blob of blue in the upper left corner area. I did get what I could see as orange by washing yellow across the red in the middle.
They say life imitates art — or is it the other way around. If this looks haphazard and disorganized to you, just imagine what my house looks like.
