Sunday, March 25, 2012

Playing With Watercolors

You all know how much I enjoy watercolors... well, recently I made my own using dry pigments, water and gum arabic. I like the richness of color you get from watercolors that you make yourself.The tube colors don't hold as much pigment, so they're generally more transparent. You just need to be careful not to inhale any of the dry powders as you work them into pastes.


Creating the colors
After I made the colors, I wanted to try some color studies with this limited palette.You can see that by mixing, I got a wide enough range of colors... but I couldn't create a real bright green without a bright yellow. All I had was the ochre. (Cadmium Yellow is REALLY expensive to purchase as a dry pigment.)


All my greens were sort of khaki, and my yellows were dark, but the variations I got when colors were overlaid were quite nice. I made lots of dots, letting some dry and leaving some wet as I overlaid other dots, just to see how the colors reacted and changed. It was fun!


I also played with lines, using the same color palette I had created. I found new colors while I was doing this study. Corals and pale pinks came out, though I have no idea from where! Well, that's not exactly true, but it was nice to see them unmuddled by other colors on my palette. 


Here's the final products from my three pieces created for this study...


I had a really fun afternoon/evening making dots and lines out of colors. I essentially had five original colors that I created from dry pigments: Cadmium Red Medium, Ultramarine Blue, English Red Dark, Yellow Ochre, and Genuine Green Earth. Pretty crazy, huh? I encourage playing with colors, especially if mixing isn't your thing. You learn a lot from playing with things! That's how we start out as kids, after all... learning from playing! It's the best way!


xox

2 comments:

Terriaw said...

I love to experiment with watercolors, but never considered making my own watercolor paints. Good for you! Sounds fun. Love your color studies, especially that piece with the lines. Great to see you painting and creating!

Brandi Hussey said...

I've never made my own watercolors before! Is it hard?

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