Dare I admit that I sometimes get bored with watercolors?! I hope that statement didn't scandalize you...but it's true. I compare a steady diet of watercolor to a steady diet of the same sandwich, made with the same ingredients everyday for lunch. After a while, my enjoyment starts to disappear and then it becomes something I do by rote without fully engaging in the activity (or eating) and that usually leads to a disaster as you should never ever attempt to paint with watercolors (or eat) unless you're fully engaged!

The beginning layout in white chalk

I love the look of chalk work and have done a little bit for myself. I recently stumbled across a couple of artists that do colored chalk work and it started me to thinking about my old pastel pencils and sticks laying in a dark drawer, forgotten. Queue the sad music...

So I went digging and finally unearthed the pencils and three sets of sticks...umm, I'm thinking there was some hanky-panky going on in the dark drawer because I'm pretty sure there were some pencils and ONE set the last time I looked! Maybe we should have queued the party music instead!

Adding color to the berries and putting down the first layer of white for the lettering

Next was the hunt for a dark/black journal and to my disappointment, I selected a journal from the Dyan Reaveley Dylusions line. I cannot recommend this journal as the binding was so tight on the book it couldn't be opened very far. When I added a little pressure, the binding (thread) popped and the front page tore away from the back where it was glued. Mind you, I didn't use a lot of pressure, it was just that tight.

Anyway, it's 8 x 8 inches which is a perfect size as you can work around all four edges and meet the middle while keeping your hand off the page. If you've ever worked with pastel or charcoal, you know what I'm sayin'. You start putting your hands on the page and you're gonna have a smeary mess in no time!

Adding the "greens" of the leaves...which also include blues, aqua, and violet

Once upon a time, I thought I was going to be a pastelist...until I fell into the wicked, web of watercolor and never quite escaped. I wanted to start out with something fairly simple until I familiarized myself with pastels once again as it has been a really, Really, REALLY long time since I used them.

I also wanted to incorporate the look of the white chalk. I think this piece could probably use more white, and I haven't yet decided if I'll try to add it in or if I'll just turn the page and do another piece. I'm leaning towards a new piece.

The piece as it currently stands...I'm thinking it's not finished.

This is as far as I've gone on the page and I'm thinking it needs a little something something...some more holly leaves, a few pieces of pine, a flourish, a _________________. Something. What do you think? Any suggestions?

While this is fun, and I have no doubt I'll do more, I will always go back to my ever faithful watercolors. I am curious to see what this latest exploration will influence my work with watercolors as my work with watercolors has influenced my approach to pastels.

What have you tried that's either new or new to you because you haven't picked it up in decades?! Please share!

In a recent conversation, an artist shared she had just purchased a pre-filled watercolor palette and it only had one green pigment. Not only did it have only one green, she confessed, she didn't even like the color. She explained it was a very "fake green" not found in nature and she didn't think she could paint a garden whether it was her own, a cottage garden in England or a botanical garden like Selby.

Since she was new to art journaling, she was not ready to spend a lot of money on tubes of paint she wasn't sure she'd ever use. I get it. Setting up a custom palette can be an expensive undertaking when you go with quality grade watercolor pigments and it requires a commitment to invest in costly supplies. (If you're looking to try top artist grade paints without the big outlay of cash, consider an ImaginaryTrips.com palette here.)

Does this mean she (or you) can't paint a garden if you only have one green pigment on your palette and you don't even like the green?

Absolutely not!

A Simple Exercise
To learn more about the green pigment(s) on our palette, we need to have some organized fun! We need to play with all those pretty colors to see what happens when we start mixing them together. I say organized fun because we want to be able to replicate any successful mixes easily. and to do that, we need to make sure we label each and every mix. If we mix with abandon, we may or may not know which pigments combined to give us that fabulous now color.

For this exercise, I used a palette of eight pigments by Yarka White Nights or Gamma brand.

Step 1. Choose a shape and draw it out on a piece of tracing paper in pencil. Flip the paper over and trace the lines several times with pencil. I chose a leaf since I was playing around with greens. The shape itself is not so important as long as the shape can easily be divided into two parts and the shape is large enough to allow ample room for playing. (My leaf was approximately 1.5 inches long by 1.25 inches wide.)

Step 2. Either on a piece of watercolor paper or on a page in your journal, trace several shapes using the tracing paper as transfer paper. I scattered the leaves around the page, but the shapes could just as easily been in neat and tidy rows. I found it more entertaining to scatter the shapes.

Step 3. Choose a green pigment and paint it from light to dark in one leaf or shape. (Example 1) This is the base color and should be labeled as such. This shows how dark the pigment is when fully saturated as well as how light it is when it is diluted with water.

Example 1

Step 4. Choose another leaf and select one color to mix with the base green. The first color I chose was yellow. At the bottom of the leaf, I painted a small spot of green and a small spot of yellow so I could look and see at a glance the two pigments I used to achieve the greens within the shape. On the right side of the leaf, I started with the green at the top of the leaf and then the second color at the bottom. I let the two paints touch and mix in the middle of the leaf without help from me. This allows for both pigments to retain some of their original characteristics as well as to combine with a second color to make something new.

Step 5. For the other side of the leaf, I mixed the pigments together on the palette before painting the mix onto the paper. I call this homogenizing the paint because you eliminate most, if not all of the original pigments' personalities to form a new color. Because I was attempting to create greens, I pushed the new mix towards green whenever possible. I also lifted the paint on this side while it was still damp because sometimes the mixtures were more pleasing when they were not fully saturated.

Step 6. Once I ran through the eight colors on the palette, I started mixing two pigments to make green. I mixed yellow and blue to see what type of green I could make. Since I only had one yellow pigment, I then moved onto creating with three pigments by adding a touch of orange to the yellow to make an Indian yellow before mixing the color with blue and with green.

Other combinations I used were yellow and brown mixed with green, blue and violet mixed with green, red and yellow with blue...all in pursuit of finding pleasing green mixes.

Oh, What You Can Learn
Every mixture you create is not going to make a pleasing green, however, it may make a gorgeous gray or a moody black or a rich brown! Just because it didn't make green doesn't mean the new mix is not useful.

Look closely at the areas where the paint was lifted while it was still wet to determine if there may be a useful color not the paint is not at full strength. Make note of any combinations you dislike so you'll know to avoid that combination in the future. If there were any combinations that were especially pleasing, draw out a few more shapes and explore them further using more or less of each pigment to find out the range of the two or three pigments when combined.

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!
Many greens available on the market and in pre-filled palettes today are mixtures of greens and yellows. Occasionally, you'll find a green mix with orange, white, blue, or even violet pigments.

When you throw blue into a green mix that contains orange, what do think will happen? It will most likely turn to a grayed green as orange and blue are complements. If you have a green that has yellow in it and you add a bit of violet the results are likely to be gray as well.

Is it bad if it makes a grayer color? Oh no! Think about a foggy morning when everything is shrouded. Those grayed greens come in handy for shadows, foggy and overcast days.

Some palettes give you the composition of the pigments used to create each pigment and some do not. Even if the information is not provided, you can often tell if a pigment is a mixture depending on how it mixes with the other colors. Use this knowledge to avoid making mud!

Label, Label, Label!
Create a legend for your page if you create a page of mixes. Be sure to include the palette you were using as well as a small example of each pigment in its pure, unmixed state. Make notes as to which side was mixed and which side the paint was allowed to mix on the paper. I find dating the page to be helpful also. This information can be invaluable later when you're sitting in the meadow in England and want to paint the leaves of a Early Gentian.

And just so you know, there are few things more frustrating than going through old mixing sheets and seeing a mix you really, Really, REALLY like and you have no idea which pigments were used to make it. I'm sure you can guess how I happened to come by that experience! Don't be like me—label, label, label!

Last But Certainly Not Least
Just as this works for green, this exercise will work for any pigment on the palette. The exercise can be very handy when you're considering adding a new pigment to the ones your existing palette. If a pigment does not mix well with over half of the pigments I use on a regular basis, I typically will not add it to my palette as I know I won't use it.

As you begin exploring the pigments on your palette, I think you will quickly find there are far more possibilities than you thought possible. The time you spend playing with the pigments NOW will pay huge dividends later when you're out on location.

Up Next...
In the next post in this series, we're going to take what we learned in our mixes and start applying it to creating a garden!

Part 2 can be found here and Part 3 can be found here!

Watercolor sprayed through a stencil Words and hard lines created with gel pens Click to enlarge

I saw an image (second image down on the post) on a blog the other day that captivated my imagination. I asked the owner of the blog how she created the image. The owner was none other than Sammie Kari of the Journal Girl blog. She answered right away with details and offered to do a video tutorial for me—you gotta love that! And she did. Here is the link to check it out.

Sammi used Adirondack Color Wash sprays to create her image. Not having any of those and really, really, really not wanting to add to my overloaded studio, I decided to see what would happen if I used watercolor and water in a sprayer/mister.

It worked great!

The only thing different I noticed was that achieving a level of color saturation that was comparable to the Adirondack sprays was difficult. My design is a bit on the light side. Altering my choice of pigments to a darker valued pigment or doing multiple layers of color, letting each dry, would also work. I think using a stencil with more complexity would also have helped.

In the image above, I used a teal blue and a light yellowish green. I would spray the stencil, pick it up, wipe it off*, and then reposition and spray again. After I was done with the stencil and the work had dried, I worked some of the green into the background. Later, after everything had dried, I doodled the words, and then added some lines to emphasize some of the swirls.

*In the video, Sammi shows how to use the ink/watercolor on the stencil to "print" a negative on another page—wish I'd of thought of that as I was doing my image!

I have no doubt this idea will be showing up in my work again soon as it was great fun and adds an interesting element to the page.

Now it's your turn to go play and have some fun!

And eventually I did find it, along with some palettes I'd totally forgotten about and being a color junkie, I just had to play with them all. Again.

It all started with that BIG box of 64 crayons...really. It's my parents' fault that I'm a color junkie. Really! There was something mesmerizing about ALL....THOSE....COLORS....in one box. And for the first month or so they had to be kept in perfect order. I would spend hours lost in that box of magic!

Some things tend to fade away with childhood, but I've found that I can repeat that particular magic whenever I get out a palette and start playing again. And I thank my parents for that gift. Time and place disappear. Something I desperately wanted to happen yesterday.

At the top of the photo above, you can see a small Sennelier palette with half the paint missing (harvested for other palettes, no doubt), a large Sennelier palette, and continuing in a clockwise circle, a Schminke palette and the smallest one is (mostly) Winsor Newton.

I save little scraps of watercolor paper to test colors and mixes on which are all those little pieces of paper you see scattered about. Most hit the trash bin, but every once in a while I come up with a combo I want to repeat. I've decided to do some sketches dedicated to the various palettes I own and see if I (or you, my lovely readers) notice a difference in the sketches.

All this play in a timeless world has led to the start of a painting. It's not quite ready for prime time yet, but maybe by the end of the week. Surprisingly, something good out of something not good.....I'll just have to go looking for sap green a little more often.  

My first carved stamp - Fleur-de-lis! The second was the leaf motif.

...But you have to know how!"

The quote is from Dr. Seuss' The Cat In The Hat book, and could not be more right. I was reintroduced to the quote reading Gretchen Rubin's blog, The Happiness Project, with a book by the same name. This particular post deals with what we think *should* be fun vs. what is really fun to us as individuals. The two are not necessarily the same thing.

On Friday, I had an opportunity to meet up with a friend for lunch. One of the first fun things I've done in the last two weeks. Those weeks have included technology nightmares along the lines of hard drive disk failure....while talking, the realization crystalized before my eyes that I hadn't been having much fun lately! (Gosh, really?! Sometimes it takes a smack from the obvious for me to take notice of said obvious!)
Since it was Friday and I was going to be without my computer for a while, I decided I needed to have some "fun." Oh my goodness....I was rather lost. What was fun? What did I want to do? I had no idea! I retreated to the office and got on the (old) computer and started surfacing the 'net. Fun? No. Procrastination.

I stumbled across a post by Aimee of Artsyville about carving inexpensive erasers from the dollar store into stamps and thought, "Hey, that sounds like fun!" Almost as quickly I dismissed the idea as I don't really use stamps in my artwork. What caught and held my attention was her comment about needing a mindset switch. Something totally different from what I normally do. And a switch it definitely was!

More stamps carved from erasers from the dollar store!

Long story made shorter, I needed to go to the library on Saturday...the dollar store was on the way....so now I had the erasers. I already had several Xacto® knives so I was good to go. When Chris saw my project he mentioned an Xacto set he'd given me some time back that had carving tools in it—score! I was set to carve my heart out and I did!

The other thing that started me on this path was my recent trip to NOLA....I brought back a wine cork from a bottle of wine Kathy of Catching Happiness and I shared while there. I had the wild idea of turning it into a stamp.....and I did! With a NOLA motif, no less....(KJ, one of these is for you!)

The two fleur-de-lis stamps are from the same cork. The bird on the right is the first synthetic cork I carved. The swirls on the bottom stamped bird were done with a gel ink pen.

Well, one fun idea leads to another and another and soon I was carving more wine corks except these were the synthetic corks made from a thermoplastic elastomer. Such fun! I had three of these synthetic corks and all had slightly different properties that gave varying results!

I have to say this was great fun and it felt good great to fill the "well" rather than to constantly draw from it. Next, I'll be to integrating some of the designs into my sketchbooks! More fun!

Two more synthetic corks with their carvings

So what do you find fun and do for fun—just for you?!! Please sure....I need to have more fun!

P.S. If you decide to try this, be very, very, very, very careful with sharp instruments.....just sayin'......