July 2012 | The Sketchbook

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Colours Walkthrough

Supplies

So here I have all my paints, my palette, and my handy dandy water bucket. There’s absolutely no chance of drinking out of this thing by accident. I also have a strip of test paper.

Here I’ve laid down a wash of diluted Ultramarine Deep, laid over by some Payne’s Grey. Both of these are Holbein colours. I’m going for a kind of cloudy look here.

In the Beginning were the Colours, of Which the World Was Made

I've soaked the paper and taped it down. (The paper is torn from my smaller sketchbook, "Nature Sketch" by Pentalic. It's got 130lb. acid free paper that's supposed to be good for watercolour. I guess we'll find out. I traced the sketch out onto another sketchbook page just in case I have to switch to Arches.)

If you have 140lb paper or below, I'd recommend stretching it. Just soak the paper for a few minutes, then lay it flat on a board. Make sure there are no air bubbles below your paper! Dab the surface off a bit, so the tape will stick better. I usually use masking tape, because the special gummed watercolour tape is evil. It just is. It sticks to everything but my paper. Leave your paper to dry so it's completely flat.

I spent the time while the paper was drying playing around with some watercolours (and a Skyrim break). I used to use Holbein exclusively, but I've recently gotten into LUKAS paints. They're beautiful, and much cheaper than the Holbeins at my favourite supplier. (The cost is about the same, but LUKAS is 24mL for the same price as Holbein's 15mL tubes.) I've found that the LUKAS sepia is greyer than the Holbein sepia. (I forgot I already had sepia... so I got another tube.)

Play with your colours! How else are you supposed to know if they can work together?

Up there in the right hand corner we have Holbein's Mineral Violet (the redder one) and LUKAS's Dioxazine Violet (bluer). I used this paper to test out my LUKAS paints, Dioxazine Violet, Sepia, English Red Light, and Cadmium Red. Then mixed them.

Look out for more updates on this one. My little sister gave me an old digital camera (she's a photographer, so she has a shiny new one from Christmas), so now I actually can take progress photos!

Sunday, July 22, 2012