Tag: watercolor painting

Poppies. And daffodils. And a new travel watercolor idea…with magnets, tin, and paint!

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So after watching “Following the White Rabbit” set up her palette  on Youtube, I was inspired to look around and see if I had a similar sized tin. I found two. One is a Pentalic drawing pencil tin, the other BARELY larger, a Sketchbook watercolor pencil tin. The tiny bit of size difference allowed the Sketchbook tin to close perfectly over my half pans, and fit an extra row of pans, too (or brushes, if I prefer, later) Plus, it’s pink and cute.

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It’s slim, lightweight, already painted white inside, and EXACTLY holds three rows of 9 half pans, so I can use it in the studio or out and about. I filled it with lots of Daniel Smith, a few Schmincke, 2 QoR, and even one A.Gallo paint.

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(yeah this is what my table generally looks like)

 

I ordered THIS magnetic tool wristband from Amazon for under $10. (Arrived in two days… bless you, Amazon) Some of the other bands’ reviews said the magnets weren’t strong enough, so check reviews carefully if you don’t get this same one… this one is quite strong enough for my needs! (You see where I’m going with this?)

I added super strong little magnets (Found HERE on Amazon) to a little plastic cup with a screw on lid, and to the bottom of a swatch card I made of the colors in my palette, set the whole thing on my wrist and was ready to try a painting… (I use E 6000 glue because I have it… there may be other glue that works for these magnets as well. Somehow between December 1st and today I have used 99 of these little magnets!)

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This worked great, and I THINK might be even better once I take it “on location” somewhere, because I’ll have my etchr bag with me to rest my arm on! It would fit ANY size tin, and I have much smaller ones if I want to use them instead, but this tin is very lightweight.

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So what do you think? Love the idea, or hate it? What type of things have you tried to make plain air or urban sketching more convenient?

-Indigo watercolor journal (I like the paper, I don’t like the spiral binding), Daniel Smith paint (Perylene red, lemon yellow, quin gold, green apatite, Uniball Micro Deluxe pen

Watercolor: flow of Daniel Smith vs QoR vs Schmincke (very briefly)- Butterflies 3/21/18

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After making a sheet of butterflies while playing around with my new QoR mini pan set, I decided to try similar pages with Schmincke and Daniel Smith paints. I didn’t have/use all the same colors, so it isn’t a complete comparison… really I wanted to compare how the paints move, and the results were as expected. I did these on Arches cold pressed 140 lb block paper. (You can see my original review of the QoR watercolor mini pans HERE.)

The QoR paint is so crazy fun… it spreads lightning fast in spidery tendrils as soon as the tip of the brush touches the wet paper. This is exciting and entertaining… and really useful sometimes.

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The Daniel Smith paints flow and blend nicely, but slowly. It’s much easier to control and allows time to lead the paint, to some extent. The granulating effect of some of the colors is impressive, and I know they have quite a few colors with strong granulation.

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The Schmincke paint spreads a little more quickly than Daniel Smith but not at all like QoR, and feels so decadent while I’m using it.

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Really, all three worked well, and the color shift when dry was similar for all. There are several colors in the Daniel Smith set and the Schmincke set that I really really love, and I know in time I will find many more. And then the QoR are just so FUN and playful.

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So now I have three pages of butterflies.

Well, they were fun, and I’m a little more familiar with my paints. But all I really learned is that I might need more colors. Yeah. That.