Friday May 7
Welcome watercolor painters!
My apologies for not responding these past couple of weeks. With the library opening and the additional entities that are a part of this new facility, the demands on my time have gone up. (people have been confusing me with superman, even though I am not wearing a cape 😁)
I expect things to settle down in the coming weeks, thank you for your patience. Please continue to ask questions and to carry on normally.
homework review
The homework assignment last week was to paint a provided canyonland scene, with all its’ layers and colors, and to see what you could do to make the dried tree trunk in the foreground stand out more than it did in the photo. Lets see how things turned out…Ahh…Hoo…
Good job everyone with your canyon land paintings and making that foreground tree stand out! I think everyone did exceptionally well on this challenging assignment -including Monte 😁 (I really enjoyed Janice’s loose rendition)
Here are some examples of last weeks 2 faces for the price of one eye training exercise:
EYE TRAINING SKETCH
Todays practice involves drawing the following figures on one piece of paper with an ink pen or marker -no pencil sketching beforehand.
(send your completed sketch to my email address above, sometime before Thursday)
THEORY
Today I want to discuss luminosity. The Luminosity in watercolor pigments is also referred to as translucency. The luminosity that watercolor pigments exhibit and the way they react when placed on paper is one of the things that attracts many of us to this medium. Most manufacturers today, identify the pigments they use with a letter number/designation such as PB-28 which means ‘Pigment Blue #28′ usually used for designating the color we know as Cobalt Blue. What I would like you to remember today, is that colors with just one listed pigment on the label, tend to create less muddiness when mixed with another color with just one listed pigment. Compound colors or ‘convenience colors’ have more than one pigment listed on the label such as Hookers Green by Daniel Smith which lists PY-36,PY-3,PO-48,PY150 (the P stands for pigment, the Y and O for yellow and orange)
If you want to mix colors with the highest amount of luminosity, check the listed pigments on your paints. Here are 6 biased colors that usually have only one listed pigment, they also tend to be very lightfast:
COOL YELLOW -Hansa Yellow Light
WARM YELLOW -New Gamboge
COOL RED -Quinacridone Rose
WARM RED -Transparent Pyrrol Orange
COOL BLUE -Thalo Blue
WARM BLUE -French Ultramarine
Here are the results of last weeks smooth gradated background practice:
PRACTICE PAINTING
Today we are going to study the label listings on our colors to see what we can learn about their pigment composition. We are interested to see if we can find any colors that have just one pigment listed, because they will tend to be more luminous. If your tubes are unreadable or if you are using pans or cake colors, you may be able to look them up on the their container box or on the internet. If neither of those options work, you can paint swatches of your colors over a blackline as we did previously to see how transparent (luminous) they are. Using the most luminous colors in your palette, see how close you can come to replicating the translucent bowl below
(send your completed painting to my email address above, sometime before Thursday)
HOMEWORK FOR FRIDAY APRIL 30
Paint the luminous seascape below or some other luminous seascape that appeals to you.
(send your completed painting to my email address above, sometime before Thursday)
Gotta run, have a good week everyone 😊 -Robert