Awhile back I purchased a  planner* from gouletpens.com and I didn’t do anything with it. I snagged it for about $4 off their clearance rack because it was for the 2010 and 2011 school year. The pages while tough enough for a lot of use for I was planning I felt needed a little heavy duty treatment,  so I started gluing pages together, every other page. This gave me a very heavy weight page.

I then applied a coat of gesso and watercolor crayon to each left hand page. I used a soft brush to really blend the colors into the gesso. Each page has a soft tint of the watercolor crayon. I then used tape that I’d masked off painting (it's got random colors all over it) with to cover up dates and calendars on the right hand page, leaving me with a nice framed grid on the right hand page.

I cut no pages from the planner. I know it’s strange but I really like that stressed out thick spine look. I also plan on adding a lot of collage to the left page. The right page may get some collage but I plan on mainly writing on it.

The other thing about this journal? I’m drawing in it with sharpies and nothing else. It’s the reason I wanted to glue pages and gesso them, so that I wouldn’t get soak through.

So far the journal is a combination of collage, sketch and writing. I always work in spreads so this journal is really working well for that.

Here’s what a spread in the book looks like with no sketching, collage or writing.

And here are a few finished pages:

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I was the sort of art student who loved the “outsider” art tacked to the walls in the basement of the official art shows in college. It was raw and rough. I liked the look.

There came a time when I grew up and I realized that even some of the most rough and rugged art looks great or even better when framed. It’s true. A frame sets art off from the wall, enshrines it and best of all emphasizes it.

Case in point, take a look at this image I painted of a sunset. It’s a small 5×7 inch painting. Alone on the wall it looks lost, even with the clean taped edge.

Stick that same image in a mat and wow, it looks so much better. As much as my 19 year old self would grumble at the added expense, this DOES look better, even in JUST the mat. Now imagine if I framed that image?

A friend of mine calls this effort, I call it extra work and added expense. But I’ve come to realize that IF I want to sell my art I have to appeal at least in part, to the buyers of art, not to my inner 19 year old rebel. Part of that appeal is handling my art in a professional manner- matting it up and placing it in a Krystal Seal bag or framing it when necessary.

I really do think that it looks a lot better when matted and those Krystalphane bags really do a great job of snazzing them up, giving you a good idea of what the piece will look like under glass.

Plus take a look at the prices on the mat and Krystal Seal bags I linked, those are pretty cheap.

I’m at that point in a painting where I want to dump a gallon of black gesso onto its surface and start all over.

Here’s the thing, I go through that with every painting. It’s a given that I hit a stage where I just hate it, hate the colors, hate the texture, hate how rough it is, and think it’s never going to get to a point where I’m happy with it.

Then I push through it, add another layer of paint, maybe some glaze, more white here, a little green here, maybe a little yellow, and soon enough it shapes up to  be closer to where I want, and then a little closer until I’m happy with it.

The problem starts when I don’t push through that barrier. If I let it go and stop working then I lose momentum and soon enough I’m staring at that crappy unfinished painting on the easel that lack clarity and mojo.

I’ll press on but I need a break from the painting but tomorrow I’ll be back at it.

As i was mixing my color swatches I noticed a few things. first, the Liquitex Basics colors are thinly pigmented. it’s great that they are relatively pure pigments but many colors that are not traditionally considered truly transparent are, due to the low pigment load. Now this is not much of a problem when you are using colors straight out of the tube but it becomes an issue when mixing shades and tones.

It’s great for mixing thicker glazes where you want some brush strokes to show through. but you may find that when you are mixing colors that you reach for those colors that have a low pigment load more and more often.  while a 2 ounce tube of Liquitex heavy body cadmium yellow light is $12- $8 and a 8.5 ounce tube of basics is $8 you’ll find the tube of the heavy body last longer because you’ll use less due to it’s EXTREMELY heavy pigment load. Meaning I can mix more greens with the heavy body versus the Basics. The 8.5 tube of basics has less than a ¼ of teh pigment that the 2 ounce tube of heavy body contains. (that could just be dramatic but it’s significantly lower.) Roughly saying a 2 ounce tube of the same color could last 4 times as long as the same tube of Basics.

I should do a measured experiment to prove my theory but I’d rather use my heavy body paints for painting…

The other observation that I made is that many colors have an inconsistent texture or consistency. The tube of cadmium yellow light is like spackle where with tube of cadmium yellow medium is thin like heavy cream and the cerulean blue is like greek yogurt. When i open a tube of Liquitex heavy body (or golden heavy)  the consistency is the same thick buttery texture, across the board for every color, unless I add gel or air brush medium.

Treat yourself to one of those pricey tubes of artist grade colors, you’ll appreciate how much longer they last versus the student grade. The texture is also very very nice. Also there is nothing that says you can’t mix and match artist/professional grade with student grade.

This week’s technique Tuesday is ridiculously easy.

It’s this:

I know, you are thinking, it’s a bottle with water in it, with a narrow tip. You think I’m crazy. Hold up, let me explain. This is a fabric dying squeeze bottle. Available for about 80 cents at artist & craftmans. People who dye stuff use it to apply tiny small precise amounts of dye to things like silk. It will dispense a fine line or a single drop of liquid.

I read a blog post that suggested that people use an old eye drop bottle to apply controlled droplets of water into a watercolor palette instead of a mister bottle to wet the palette, which is what I’ve been using until now. As many of you who have been reading this for any period of time know, I have allergies, I use massive amounts of eye drops so I don’t look like I’m crying constantly. (Seriously I use a lot of them.) Anyway, I’ve kept the bottles until now to use with ink. But the last time I was at A&C I was poking through the small baskets of stuff and found these (apparently I did this once before too as I found another of them) little bottles. At 80 cents Jane and I both bought one.

And it’s perfect, it dispenses one perfect drop or several with ease and only in the pan I want it in rather than EVERYWHERE like the mister.

It also keeps the water pristine, I’d like to see you stick a brush into the tip! It fills easily, either by sucking water in or by removing the little tip and running it under running water.

After my art adventure with Jane Saturday I really wanted to narrow my palette down to the 8 colors I thought would work best for me. I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do when I run out of the paints that are in the small 22ml tube sizes. I may be forced to remove the water bottle from the pochade and just use my drinking water bottle for rinse water. If I do that I’ll switch to my 40 ounce KleenKanteen instead of the 1 pint bottle I’m using currently.

I headed to the basement and painted swatches of how colors mixed with one another. A scientific approach to picking the right colors for me. I used cheap mead 3×5 inch index cards. I painted on the blank side and wrote the name of each color represented. Here are some pictures. Please be aware I did not focus on making these neat, merely on mixing 2 colors; sometimes 3 colors.

These are held together by a 7 Gypsies cable ring that Dede kindly sent me. These things are super cool and very useful. I may have to buy a whole package of them. Or figure out how to make them…

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Important to note that this post was written with acrylic in mind, watercolors have their own palette choices that work differntly from acrylics. I'll address watercolors in a future post.

Why is palette choice so important to painting en plein air? Ultimately you want to carry the minimal amount of equipment to make the picture happen. You could carry every color you have available but that would make for a very heavy pack and awkward hiking. Using every color available tends to leave a painting with a disharmonious feeling. Paintings tend to have a harmonious feel when colors have been mixed with other colors in the painting. When you using paint straight from the tubes paintings tend to not jive as well as if you’ve added a touch of another color in your palette to the other colors.

The important thing with an en plein air palette is the colors you get by mixing 2 and 3 colors together. Some people use the same palette over and over again and others are constantly rearranging their palette, dropping in a new red or blue or swapping out a yellow. To each their own.

In acrylic I tend to work with the same palette for a warm season and switch to a more expansive palette in the winter months. This is because I usually work mostly inside in the fall and winter whereas in the summer I tend to work on location far more often.

Currently my palette is considered pretty large by plein air standards and it’s highly likely I’ll get rid of a yellow and a blue shade, but we’ll see.

Here are some excellent links on the subject of limiting your palette.

 Gurney

Learning to See

Channeling Homer

Channeling Homer also has a "pamphlet" about palette picking, and it's good

I frequently limit my palette to 2 or 3 colors, usually titanium white, a blue and then a warm color like titan buff or yellow ochre. This is an exercise I may explore again.

Yesterday Jane and I headed to Salem Willows for a little painting. My goal today was to get a handle on my sky and the forms of the trees. Whilst painting I realized that the palette I’ve included in my pochade is not completely right for what I’m doing. Jane and I also had a discussion about palettes and how somethings are right for some things but not others, like portrature verses landscapes.

My current palette is as follows:

• Cad yellow light
• Cad yellow Medium
• Cad Orange
• Aliz Crimson
• Pthalo blue
• Cobalt Blue
• Ultramarine Blue
• Unbleached Titanium white (Titan Buff for you Golden fans)
• Titanium White
• Mars Black

Now to be fair I’ve never included a black in my pochade palette in the past and I just sort of tossed it in on a whim, which is strange to think given how damn small this pochade is and how much smaller it is than my last box.

It is also interesting to note that I don’t have a single earth tone in here- not a drop of raw or burnt umber or sienna. Again, an oddity given my love of earth tones and their heavy use in my watercolor palette. Perhaps I was unconsciously rejecting my watercolor palette? Who knows, but an earth tone or two will be included in the next packing of the pochade. Also, yellow ochre is nowhere to be see.

It’s as if I closed my eyes and picked a palette not really suited to the sort of painting I was planning.

The all of the color except unbleached titanium were colors that my Painting 101 instructor listed on the “to buy list” for the class. Perhaps I was just grabbing some old familiars?

I’ve been trying to mix all the shades of green that I want but the truth is that it’s making me smash my head against the wall. Color mixing is entirely different for watercolors and acrylics. With watercolors it is much easier to mix the shades of green you need from just a few shades of blue and yellow. It is not the same for acrylic. I’m adding pthalo green to the mix. It will replace one of the 3 blues, which I’m not sure but right now I’m leaning toward ultramarine getting kicked out. I’m replacing the black with burnt umber.

This will shock people, given my love for this particular color, but I’m considering kicking Alizarin Crimson out of the box. It’s a great shade of red but for the space in the pochade I can get more mileage out of Napthal red. If I add nappy red (as I like to call it) I’ll also get rid of cad orange. Nappy red makes great oranges with either of the cad yellows. I will keep both cad yellows as they mix with the blues and the pthalo green to make different shades of green.

Cobalt blue may be replaced with cerulean blue but I’m not sure yet. This leaves me with the following:

• Cad yellow light
• Cad yellow Medium
• Cad Orange-
• Aliz Crimson- Napthol red
• Pthalo blue
• Cobalt Blue (questioning this one)
• Ultramarine Blue- Pthalo Green
• Unbleached Titanium white (Titan Buff for you Golden fans)
• Titanium White
• Mars Black– Burnt Umber

After I got back from my art adventure I headed to my studio and dumped the contents of the pochade out and started making color swatches of the colors in the box, to see what colors I could mix by mixing each color with the others in the box. It was enlightening and led to the switches seen above. Then I look through my swatches and I debate removing ultramarine from the mix…

Next up will be mixing a series of swatches from my studio palette. That will take substantially more time, I have 20 or 30 colors of paint. Then… I'll be doing this with my watercolors. This will certainly cut back on my cult of stuff purchases. I have that in check with watercolors, as I've always kept a list in my planner of the watercolors I need to replace. INterestingly enough I rarely stray from that list. Though on the rare occasion i have, I've ended up with colors that I use regularly, like indigo and red ochre.

These are to distract you that I forgot to write my review for the week.