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Limited Palette Portrait
This weekend think about limiting your color choices so that you can maximize your color mixes. Here’s a portrait with the colors I used listed. Four pigments resulting in a lot of different mixes. When you mix with a limited palette your color mixes have a relationship to each mix that is also on your […]
Mixed Media Portrait Supplies
Sometimes you work in watercolor and you pick up some color pencils too. It’s fun, why not? Especially if you spent your childhood working with color pencils. I started this portrait of a fairgoer from Earth’s World using a black grape Prismacolor pencil. (It’s not black, it’s not overly strident. I enjoy it. I also […]
Another Limited Palette Portrait
You can click on the image to see an enlargement and read the text. I’ve got the colors swatched: Saturn Red, a cool red which I think is Quin Pink (based on how it’s reading in the finished portrait), Indanthone blue (PB60) and Azure Cobalt blue (because I love the granulation), Green Gold, Burnt Sienna […]
Cerulean Blue Chromium—Does it Stay or Does It Go?
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that my friends like to talk to me about pigments. A couple years ago my friend Paul started talking to me about Cerulean Blue Chromium (CBC). In the Daniel Smith line it’s PB36. There is no standard usage of paint names in the industry so in a different line a different […]
Lots of Palette Changes
I intended to simply write about this palette chart today, but in preparing this post I found lots of photos and scans of different palettes over the years. I am posting them today as a sort of virtual tour through my palettes since I’ve had the blog (2009; oops, actually going back to 2003 with […]
Color Chart Fun
The best way to learn your pigments is to put them to real-world tests painting subjects you might actually paint. Your mind has to work out how to adjust color temperature and value on the fly. You get to use up leftover paint that you already had out on your palette. Creating a color range […]
Selecting Pinks for Portraits
At the beginning of this year I had some palette choices to make. Whether to keep Opera Pink on my palette was one of those choices. If you look at my journals and out of journal paintings you’ll see that I kept testing Opera Pink. It wasn’t a color that I actively sought out. It […]
In Context: Taking Time to Note Your Color Mixes
Even when you’re rushing to get a quick portrait study done, you’ve got time to test some color mixes and note them down for future reference. That’s what’s happening on this page spread (as well as some notes about life). I love Azure Cobalt Blue from Schmincke but it doesn’t give the dark values I […]
Super Granulating Pigments from Schmincke—Again
When I first wrote about Schmincke’s Super Granulating Pigments I did a portrait demo using only those pigments. You can see blog post and video here. This year I pulled the super granulating pigments from Schmincke out again to see if I would find a way to enjoy them in portraits while using other […]
Direct Brush Sketching with Another Rigger/Liner Brush
Last month I did another rigger/liner brush test—sketching Rick Niece again. While I missed the likeness I had a ton of fun with the line and shapes I could make with the Silver Ruby Satin Scriptliner 2. This was, and looks like it will continue to be, my favorite, or one of my favorites going […]