The Cotman Sketchers Pocket Box. I’ve been using Cotmans for a couple of years now, since I started with watercolor.
I’ve been laying low here for the last week because I enrolled in Liz Steel’s Sketching Now Watercolour online course and it’s been keeping me quite busy! From the intro lessons alone, I was hooked. There’s so much for me to learn about paper, paints, and pens: all the things vital to my dreams for my future art endeavors. I’ve only just finished Lesson One, but I am learning so much already! (Already I’ve learned some techniques that I can apply to some snail-art concepts that I’ve had in mind for months. I can’t wait to get going on those again!)
I focused this week on spending as much time in the online course as I could because I have a watercolor workshop coming up this weekend. I signed up for this online class in advance in hopes that it could give me a boost before the workshop. I figure that having a baseline that’s more than ‘zero’ should help me get even more out of my weekend class!
But, as I’ve worked my way through the online assignments, I’ve finally started to feel the limitations of my student-grade paints. All along others have advised me that artist-grade paints make all the difference and are easier to learn with. Over the last two weeks, I’ve worked hard to familiarize myself with the different artist-grade watercolors and what other artists have to say about them. However, I’ve continued to be reluctant to invest in such costly paints because I don’t yet have a solid enough understanding of pigments, mixing, and paints to be able to build a palette with any confidence.
Practicing varied washes with the Cotmans. I’ll have to do this exercise with my new palette soon. I can’t wait to see the differences!
But thanks to the very practical help and generosity of a dear friend, I got my first artist-grade watercolor palette set up today, months earlier than I originally planned! I couldn’t have done it alone because I am still so new at color-mixing to know what I would want or need. Having the opportunity to go through, paint by paint, with someone who has watercolor experience and also knows my personal style and color-goals was a priceless experience! I’m very grateful. I trust using better quality, more pigmented paints will have a positive impact on my studies (at least that’s what I keep being told!)
As lovely and colorful as this immersion has been (with all of the online classwork and the hours spent researching, shopping, and setting up my palette) I admit that it left me rather brain fried and in need of a break! Luckily, it will take a couple of days for my freshly squeezed paints to firm up in their pans so it’s a mandated moratorium on all things watercolor.
Instead I spent my evening sitting next to my new and lovely palette. I gazed lovingly at it and occasionally poked at it to see if it was dry yet (definitely not) while I spent my evening working on pen strokes.
After so many hours of learning about quality paints and papers in a medium I don’t yet understand, honestly all I wanted was my extravagantly feathered, cheap, ballpoint pen and a plain old spiral notebook. These are tools I know inside and out. I’ve been doodling with ballpoints on lined paper since junior high. It was the perfect chill antidote to all the fancy, brainy learning and research I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks. It was the equivalent of tucking into a mom-made casserole. High class cuisine is a treat to be sure, but sometimes all you want is the familiarity of some comfort food.
These pen stroke exercises are from Pen & Ink Drawing by Alphonso Dunn. (His YouTube channel is a great help for watercolor and color theory as well. His color theory videos got me started in beginning to understand color-mixing!)
I’m going to go do some more comfort-sketching and then I’m going to bed! Goodnight y’all. 💛