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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 […]
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 […]
Vintage Hair—Mixed Media and Palette Organization
Today it’s a photo step-by-step and not a video as I paint a mixed media portrait with a vintage hair style. Since I’m not teaching currently I sometimes turn the drawing table camera on for my own benefit to look at how I progressed through stages. But sometimes I simply take photos at various stopping […]
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 […]
Paint Advice: Filling Watercolor Pans with Tube Paint
Note: I’ll be published this post on my Patreon site in answer to some question. I think it is useful here as well because I do get a lot of questions on this aspect of my practice and many posts on RWU relating to it are now in the non-public archive. I hope this will […]
Fitting More Pans in a Square Metal Palette from Schmincke
This enlargement of the holding capacity of the Schmincke metal palette box, will work with other palette boxes using the metal strip-holding-bar visible in the second photo. As the Minnesota State Fair approaches of course I’ve been testing pigments and making choices on what gear I’ll be taking to the Fair for sketching. Today I’m […]
Great Low-Cost Paint Palettes for Watercolor and Gouache
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.