Deep dive into colors in watercolors
These last weeks, I’ve been sooo inspired by colors in watercolors. Every evening, I would come back from work and start swatching my colors, playing with pigments, looking at the granulation, the mixes, rethinking my palettes, etc. Last week, I created a Youtube video where I show all of my palettes and swatch the colors. In this blog, I just want to talk even more about them, and add some pictures and comparisons :) So brace yourself and let’s dive in the world of colors!
Please, bear in mind that the colors may look very different from what you will actually get!
Watercolors - my first love
Before starting wit the actual colors, I just wanted to explain why I’m doing this with watercolors and not acrylics, gouache or something else. When it comes to playing with colors, I think that nothing can really beat watercolors. They have so many characteristics that makes mixing and swatching super fun: granulation, transparency, stain, etc. They can be more or less tinting. They can be single pigmented or a mix of pigments. In my Youtube channel, I made a video discussing how I think about my very limited palettes (you can find it here). Usually, I want transparent, single-pigmented pigments, as it makes it easier to create clean mix and layer colors. I also prefer non-staining colors because it allows me to lift them off the paper, and I also feel they are a little bit less tinting (so easier to mix). When it comes to granulation, I have my phases: somethimes I love to have very clean and predictable mixes, and sometimes I just want to add this “lill somth” that you can only achieve with watercolors. However, I also had my crazy granulation phase and realized it was a bit too wild for me! Below you can see a landscape experiment on Fabriano Artistico cold pressed watercolor paper, I have used 3 granulating colors (Winsor & Newton Potter’s Pink and Cobalt Turquoise light, and Schminke French Ultramarine) in addition to one low-tinting and non-granulating color (White Nights Ochre light). Th result is fun, but the painting process was quite hard, as I never really could predict what was going to happen. Depending on the paper and on the amount of water you are using, the granulation will appear differently, but some colors/brands granulate very heavily (like Schmincke French Ultramarine), which can be fun to play with (and create wonderful color separation in mixes) but also hard to control!
Landscape with granulating watercolors
The palettes
So, back to the palettes. I am currently working with five limited palettes:
2 Portable Painter Micro with 6 half pans each,
one Portable Painter Classic, with 12 small half pans
one small metal boy with 8 full pans of White Nights (you can see me swatching the 12 full pans in this video), 3 half pans and 1 half pan of Shinhan copper gouache
one small metal box with 5 full pans, 6 half pans and1 half pan of Shinhan gold gouache
What I find super nice, is how versatile the palettes can be. Once you have some tubes of watercolors, you can just create full pans of half pans and move them around in the different palettes to create whatever color combinations feel right at the time. My Portable Painter Classic is my experimentation and playful palette, that I keep near my couch at all time to just ahve fun with combinations of colors that I change very often, The Portable Painter Micro are mostly used outside. I will go more into the details of the differences between the two and in which case I would use one over the other later in this blogpost. And finally my metal box are my “everything palettes”, I use them both in the studio and outside. Usually I would go for one of these palettes for “full” watercolor illustrations, and less for mixed media work. And if I need to work larger scale (which I harldy ever do), I would probably work straight from the tubes!
Brands and colors
I for now own 5 brands of watercolors. I started with Winsor&Newton Cotman (the big plastic palette with 40+ colors, and a small field case), and I slowly use them up by putting them in my Portable Painter Classic. I then bought a metal box with 12 full pans of White Nights (my first professional watercolors - with a very usual color selection). After that, I decided to start buying tubes and making my own palettes. I chose 7 Schmincke Horodam colors (6 very usual ones + Perylene Green). When I say usual, it will be cool primaries + ultramarine and a few earthy tones. Around the same time, I also decided to take a leap and buy some “weird” colors from three high-end brands: professional Winsor&Newton (Potter’s Pink, Cobal turquoise light and Neutral tint) and a few tiny 5mLDaniel Smith (Lavender, Buff Titanium, Viridian, Undersea Green) and Sennelier (Lemon Yellow, French vermilion, Quinacridone Gold, Warm Sepia and Greenish Umber). A few months later, I tried 3 granulating Mijello Gold Mission watercolors (Granite Stone Black, Shadow Violet and Peacock Blue). I love the collection of watercolors I own right now. There are some stuning colors (like Quinacridone Gold, French Ultramarine, Greenish Umber to cite a few) and I can create wonderful mixes. Of course, I am always interested in trying out new brands and new colors… But it is by no mean necessary!
Swatches
The next few images are going to be photos of the swatches, done on -bottom&right-100% cotton watercolor paper (Arches cold pressed) and -top&left- on 35% cotton watercolor paper. I am going to put in the description the palettes and the colors inside. If you want some more information on the pigments and everything, just let me know and I can make another blogpost with some more details (I am sort of obsessed, but I don’t want to give you an indigestion just now).
Some swatches of the palettes. From top to bottom and left to right. Top sketchbook. Portable Painter Micro 2 (Sennelier French vermilion, Sennelier Lemon yellow, Winsor & Newton Cobalt Turquoise light, Schmincke Helio Cerulean, Sennelier Warm Sepia, Mijello Stone Granite Black) / Portable Painter Micro 1 (Schmincke Transparent Ochre, Schmincke Pure Yellow, Schmincke Transparent Sienna, Schmincke Ruby Red, Scmincke French Ultramarine, Daniel Smith Viridian) / Portable Painter Classic (Winsor & Newton cotman Yellow Ochre, Winsor & Newton cotman Lemon Yellow, Sennelier Greenish Umber, Winsor & Newton Potter’s Pink, Winsor & Newton cotman Light Red, Winsor & Newton cotman Permanent rose, Winsor & Newton cotman Viridan, Winsor & Newton cotman Sap Green, Winsor & Newton cotman Prussian Blue, Winsor & Newton cotman Turquoise, Winsor & Newton cotman Dioxazine Violet, Daniel Smith Lavender) / Metal box 1 (White Nights Cadmium Yellow, Winsor & Newton Neutral Tint, White Nights Viridian, White Nights Carmine, Schmincke Perylene Green, White Nights Ochre light, White Nights Cobalt azure blue, White Nights Burnt umber, White Nights Ultramarine, Daniel Smith Buff Titanium, White Nights Red Ochre) / Metal box 2 (Sennelier Lemon Yellow, White Nights Cadmium Red light, Daniel Smith Undersea Green, Sennelier Quinacridone Gold, Sennelier Greenish Umber, Schmincke Ruby Red, Schmincke Helio Cerulean, Winsor & Newton Potter’s Pink, Daniel Smith Lavender, Schmincke French Ultramarine, own violet: Schmincke French Ultramarine + Schmincke Ruby Red + Daniel Smith Viridian).
More swatches!
So, these are all of my palettes! Below, I will put some close-ups of the swatches so that you can better see the different between how they act on different papers. I feel like it is easier to see the granulation on 100% cotton paper, and the colors may look a bit more vibrant (to my eyes)-
Portable Painter Micro 1 on 35% cotton paper (top) and 100% cotton paper (bottom).
Close ups of greens on 100% cotton paper (left - Daniel Smith Undersea Green & Sennelier Greenish Umber) and 35% cotton paper (right).
Classic VS wild palettes & very limited palettes
If you look at my two Portable Painter Micro and my two metal boxes, maybe you can see a trend here. I tend to have my “safe” palettes, with the primaries + earthy colors, and maybe one or two “experiementing” colors, and my “fun” palette, with a wilder choice of colors. If you take the Portable Painter Micro 1, which is the first palette I did myself, all the colors are either from the split primaries (cold/warm yellow, blue and red) or eathy ones. I swapped the Helio Cerulean for Daniel Smith’s viridian. This is a very interesting color, because it is not as highly tinting as some other viridian, and it is granulating (it is single pigmented, but not the usual PG7). This added a fun twist to an otherwise “plain” palette. On the contrary, the Portable Painter Micro 2 has a wide-range of crazy colors, with super bright blues and yellows and a very intense red. I use the warm sepia and the heavily granulating black to mute down the other colors and create some moody and earthy mixes. This has been a super fun palette to experiment with!
Also, I really enjoy working with 6 random colors, especially for plein-air. It takes out a lot of the deicison-making and helps me create more coherent pieces. I also like my Metal boxes, but I always feel a tension between having more colors to experiment with, and realizing I feel lost when I have more than 6 to 10 colors…(especially outside or on-the-go). For instance, some of my new colors are not receiving so much love because they are only part of the “bigger” palettes, and I cannot mix and experiment as much in such settings. Maybe I should only buy a handful of Portable Painter Micro or some other really small metal palettes! I have seen some people just reuse some small metal box to put their watercolors in, and I find it to be a great idea. I am not sure about how to create a white mixing space though, but I will look into that! I still use my bigger palettes, but I feel I first need to experiment with colors in smaller setting before being comfortable with using them in the studio and in bigger settings. I could also not completely fill the metal boxes… but I mean… there is space!
A few tests & Play
One thing I have been thinking about lately (Actually, that was after seeing a video from Sketches.n.Scrubs) is how to create nice granulating mixes, without investing in the crazy expensive granulating lines of famous watercolor brands… I did a few tests of seein which colors were labeled as “granualting” by the brand. Some had a barely noticable granulation, but others had a very strong one. Then I tried mixing these colors with some phthalo and other single-pigmented colors I owned, to create and re-create some granulating colors with beautifu color separation. Here are the results from these tests. Your really need to wait for the colors to completely dry, as only then it will reveal the color separation! Some of these mixes are really great and made me want to experiment more with the reds and browns (I am considering buying a more heavily granulating brown, as it is very useful in landscapes, both for water and for natural greens)! It is also the reason why I added the viridian to my Portable Painter Micro, or the cadmium red light to one of the bigger metal box, so that I can create some fun mixes!
Some granulating mixes.
Some more tests in granulation.
For this experimentation, I have mostly used my one-pigment watercolors, even though I also swatched some of the other granulating colors (heavily granulating colors with multiple pigments are more standalone colors for me, rather than mixing ones). The granulation in the White Nights is quite subtle, but it creates some nice pigment separation in the mixes (that is not as wild and intense as the Potter’s Pink, so I’m not sure how well it will show on the images). I did these swatches on 100% cotton paper (Arches cold pressed), but the texture of the paper is a little bit different from one side to the other, and the granulation did not seem to show as much on the left part of the second image, so I did some bigger and more watery swatches on the other side.
I have also compared side by side some colors I have in multiple brands. I am always impressed by the drying shift of some colors, and how intense (or not) some end up being. I was a little bit disappointed with some of the Schmincke I chose, as they tend to lose their intensity when they dry (even though I still really enjoy using them in mixes). I also realized I do not like ochres as much as I thought I did, as they lack a bit of this luminosity you can find in warm and less earthy yellows or in my last love - quinacridone gold.
Comparing colors from different brands.
If you’ve made it so far, congrats! I hope you’ve enjoyed this long blogpost and don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like some more information :)
