This was the holidays, so a short update.
Since I’m starting a longer journey, I picked up a set of travel watercolors for that romantic notion of finally being able to do travel sketching with watercolors.
I know a bit about them, as well as a bunch of things I can’t do well yet. I know the watercolor paper warps. Water management is critical: if you want the paint to go where you paint, and not flow somewhere else, you need the brush to be the right amount of dampness relative to the paper. Or you can wait until the paper is completely dry, but I also know I haven’t developed enough patience yet.
Continuing on my interest in colors are the watercolor pigments. Despite all of the names, there aren’t too many you need to know about to get started. There are warm and cool primaries, depending on whether the shade is slightly clockwise or counterclockwise around the color wheel relative to the primary color. Colors look really nice mixed with something burnt like umber. A good exercise is creating a reference where you mix every possible combination of your color palette. And wet paint from the tube is going to be more pigmented than the watered-down version you get from dry pigment. But dry pigment is easier to carry around. There are other things about color pigment, like if it fades in the sun or if there are little grains in it, but I don’t think I’m quite there yet to know what I want.
Something that surprised me is that because it’s so hard to undo, if you have something specific in mind, you have to do a ton of planning. You need to know how you will layer the colors, what gradients of dampness to use, and you need to mix a lot of the colors you want to use because you probably can’t mix another batch to exactly match. Also, if you have an area that should all be the same color, you have to do it all at once before your palette starts evaporating. It feels more like a performance kind of thing, or screen printing, or even manufacturing/fabrication, where you need to figure a lot out in advance of doing the thing. So I do sketches to see how the paint will actually behave, just like I do tests and iterate to see how the 3D printed object feels. I keep getting surprised at how similar art practice is to engineering.
After remembering how unforgiving fluid dynamics is, I went back to the store to pick up some gouache. This was very fun! You make a color, and then you can turn your paper that color. Incredible!
The whites aren’t quite as white, so it’s still better to plan things out ahead of time.