Tag Archives: palette

All set for watercolour

May 17, 2017 Ade Leave a comment

Annual holidays eh? Such a treat! For me they are increasingly a chance to get some mental breathing room to rein back my long-standing depression and let me paint for a while. Change of location I guess, away from everything. Lovely.

So, in a couple of weeks I’ll be off again to my all-time favourite destination, the Lizard Peninsular in Cornwall.

I love working plein air, usually with a pochade box, a tripod and oils or acrylics. This year however I’m leaving all that malarkey at home so I can concentrate on watercolour.

Must say I’m nervous. I’m far more comfortable painting in oils or acrylics, but on the plus side this is an opportunity to practice. And, as a bonus, the switch will make my kit considerably lighter. My back’s going to thank me for that!

Personally I’ve always found pure watercolour particularly difficult. I really love the luminosity to be had, but struggle so much to keep things clean and ‘pure’. The very act of mentally deconstructing a scene to paint from light to dark makes my brain bend like a banana in a yoga class…

But, when I work on holiday my paintings are usually only intended to be sketches for pleasure, not finished pieces. Does it really matter how I resolve an image as long as it works for me? I guess not. Big plan then: loosen up and to hell with that transparency gig. I’m taking gouache. And pastel pencils too. I can hear the purists screaming; I feel your pain.

In terms of kit, I plan to take:

My trusty Frank Herring Dorchester watercolour palette. I’ve tried many through the years and always come back to this one. Lightweight and with plenty of mixing room. And as I’ve had it since the early ‘90s, I guess it’s pretty robust too!
W&N and Holbein artists’ gouache, although I’m not too certain about the latter. Probably my lack of experience, but I find the Holbein extremely strongly tinted and difficult to handle.
A self-sealing palette specifically for the gouache. Not tried this one before, (pinched it from Carole…), so let’s see if it really does keep the paint moist without an unholy mixture of runny Ultramarine and Alizarin Crimson dribbling into my rucksac… Colourful, but it makes a real mess of your butties.
A plastic rosette palette for mixing gouache – I don’t want to mix it with my watercolours, well, not off the page anyway…
Da Vinci sable travelling brushes 3, 6 and 10.
A selection of synthetic brushes for the gouache.
Pastel pencils. Looks like I’m taking a lot, but will edit down each day depending on what I’m doing.
Various graphite and carbon pencils for sketching. There’re a few spares in there so again I’ll edit down to essentials once I arrive.
Masking tape (broad and narrow). I like to divide my pages, and a white border always looks so good.

As usual I’m going to keep my colour palette simple with warm and cool variants of the primaries: 2 reds, 2 blues and 2 yellows. I’ll supplement these with a few earth colours and darker variants to create denser areas of tone.

For paper I’ll be using my favourite: Saunders Waterford both in a large hard bound book (my Cornwall book) and in a few pads.

I’ll also take my Stillman and Birn sketch pad and a Moleskine watercolour journal for ‘light’ days.

And that’s it. Hopefully, Wi-Fi willing, I’ll be able to post more when I get down there. In the meantime remember I’m often more active on my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts so please check me out there too.

Acrylics, Reviews

Review: New Wave Easy Lift Palette

February 1, 2015 Ade Leave a comment

As I mentioned using the New Wave Easy Lift Palette in my previous post I thought I’d repeat my full review which I posted on Jackson’s Art Supplies web site.

After years of working in oils and alkyds over the past year I’ve made the transition to acrylics. This change of medium has meant a change in work practice.

With oils I was used to working off a wooden palette and cleaning it at the end of a session. However the ‘stick and stay put’ nature of acrylics soon put paid to this.

Easy Lift palette ready to unpack — Ready to unpack

After experimenting, unsuccessfully, with various palette surfaces I switched exclusively to the disposable varieties. But then I saw this New Wave palette at Jackson’s Art Supplies which, to be honest, sounded too good to be true. Disposable palettes are good, but I prefer to work off a solid surface, so I had to give it a shot.

Visually the New Wave’s signature shape is interesting, offering three points of support. However having played around with the recommended position, perversely I found it more comfortable to hold the palette lengthways. I have to say though that this is a personal preference and not down to any design flaw.

Cleaning

As expected wet paint wipes very easily from the palette, so for a sterner trial I deliberately allowed my acrylics to dry solid for a over a week. Previous experience with other plastic palettes suggested this might render the paint completely immovable.

Picking at the larger blobs resulted in sheets of paint being lifted off, which was an encouraging start. Things became more awkward as the chunks gave way to thin glazes of paint. With my short nails I found it difficult to get things started; some aid was required. I knew that anything metal would scratch the surface and first tried a plastic scraper (pinched from our freezer). This worked, but left scuff marks on the palette surface.

Using card to scrape — Scraping paint away with thin card

By trial and error I found stiff card worked very well without leaving any obvious marks. An off cut from a pack of batteries held at a shallow angle quickly cleared half of the palette. For the remaining paint I wanted to test whether water would make things easier. As I used fairly hot water I was relieved when the palette didn’t show any signs of bowing or distortion.

Gentle scrubbing to remove remaining paint

With a little detergent the hardened paint film sloughed cleanly away from the surface, encouraged by a soft nailbrush as a gentle ‘persuader’. Besides being relatively easy to remove hardened paint, it was also interesting to see that the white plastic hadn’t been stained, remaining bright white.

Conclusion

Long term it will be interesting to see if accumulated scuffs in the surface will lead to a stronger bond with the paint, but so far I’m very pleased; the palette lives up to it’s description and is a welcome addition to my acrylic kit.

Acrylics, Paintings, Reviews

New year, new palette

January 15, 2015 Ade Leave a comment

Finally I’ve crawled out from under that duvet! Been a while though hasn’t it? Well, after a very emotionally charged and challenging year I did promise myself a break. Problem is it now feels like I’ve been asleep pretty much through the whole of Christmas and New Year…

In truth, I haven’t been completely idle. I did a half-hearted acrylic sketch some gorgeous Narcissi from the Isles of Scilly. It coincided with #stilldecember on Twitter so at least I had one contribution to make.

Testing the New Wave ‘Easy Lift’ palette

For a while I’d been meaning to test the New Wave ‘Easy Lift’ plastic palette, and the festive break seemed the ideal time. This is designed with acrylics in mind although at first I was fairly sceptical. I like to work off a clean palette, but all previous plastic palettes I’ve owned have become caked very quickly with immovable dried paint. Determined to give this a tough trial, I let the paint dry on it for a week before trying to clean it. Have to say I was very impressed with the result. You can read my full review here on Jackson’s Blog.

I also tried out their ‘Grey Pad’, a large disposable palette comprising mid-grey sheets rather than the usual white to help with tonal judgement. To be honest I found it’s most useful attribute was its larger size. Its very generous dimensions allow lots of room for mixing. The grey tint is an interesting idea, but for me it needs to slightly darker. Other than that in use it functions no better or worse than similar disposables.

And two new acrylic paintings

And while I was testing the palettes I did stray from my original intention not to be creative and accidentally squeezed out a couple of new acrylic paintings. The first, on 14″ by 10″ canvas board, was inspired by an old photo of a snowy lane at Northycote Farm and Country Park. I was careful not to be too influenced by the photo. Like many snaps of snow it was fairly flat, blue and bland. You’ll see that I spiced it up a little with a new wintry sky and some warmer reflections. I’m pleased to say that this sold very quickly at its first public airing last week.

Towards Golden Cap - Autumn — Towards Golden Cap – Autumn

My second painting is on a 20cm by 40cm linen canvas. I’d had this hanging round for a couple of months. So I dug out my Devon and Dorset sketch book and chose a misty, autumnal view of Golden Cap looking east down the beach from Charmouth. Although I also had a photo I didn’t refer to it, taking all my information from my watercolour sketch. Without the photo I felt a lot more freedom to ‘make things up’. I’m sure I’ve remodelled the cliffs but, shhh, don’t tell anybody! This will be available for sale shortly, unframed, through my Twitter feed, but if you are interested do email me. For the moment I only ship to UK addresses.

So my New Year has started well, hope yours has too.

Ade Turner Art