Value studies are a fundamental skill taught in many high school and college art classes. Grab a brush, or dip pen, and a bottle of India ink plus some water and you’ve got the tools you need for a simple black and white value study. It’s simple it’s effective. You have to think in terms of black gray and white.

When I had my summer of art way back in 2002 (0r 03?) I did a LOT of value studies and simple pen and ink drawings. I’ve written about this summer extensively. I got up, drove to a tourist spot, drew and painted, then came home and listed EVERYTHING on eBay. Every sketch, every doodle.

​Shockingly most of it sold and pretty quickly. I sent out India ink sketches all over the US and a surprising number overseas.

I decided to return to some of my artistic roots last night, but with a twist.

Yesterday, I shot a video that will go live on Thursday, about the importance of prep work. In that video I use Meeden soft body matte acrylic paint to tone canvases and paper. I spent about 2 hours outside in my backyard toning 10 small canvases, 5 medium panels, and 30 pieces of paper. Big brush and 5 shades of paint. I mixed mud and  grays and used the colors straight out of the bottles.

The matte paint is really nice for working on top of with India Ink. So last night I pulled a stack of these toned papers out and started to do some value studies. Simple pen and ink, created with pens made from Knot Weed*. Making reed style pens with knot weed is probably the only really good use for it, other than eating the shoots on occasion. Anyway, it seemed like a fun thing to do- create drawings of a place using a tool I gathered the materials for in the place I’m drawing.

Cutting a reed pen from knot weed needs a sharp strong knife. It’s best to cut the general shape of the pen while the knot weed is still soft and green. It’s much harder to cut when it’s dry, but it’s not terrible to shape when dry.

I cut myself 5 pens, cracked one and ended up with 4 usable dip pens. (More on these later.)

I used my images of the stormy skies and started to create while watching the dark thriller Furious.  

This one is the simplest- India ink, walnut ink, and a small amount of colored pencil. The ink was scraped away to create the lighter areas.

A little more complicated here, the toned paper had 2 colors- pink and gray. IT worked really well for this image. I used the widest pen to create some marks that look like balsam fir to me. The lightness of the sky was added in with white water soluble crayons. A hint of gray colored pencils.

I let myself get a little wild with this one- all the materials stated but I also used an acid brush to add in some water and create some variation with the white crayon and walnut ink. I used the sides of the pens to scrape away and move the ink into puddles.

Trying to capture the dark airiness of this tree on the left. I think I did okay with scraping the ink around with the side of the pen.

This was the last one I worked on. This is nit a scene of Maine but of the Willows. I wanted to capture the trees airiness, plus the sticks of the bushes and the angular harshness of the rocks. I like how the walnut ink bled into the sky. I tempted fate with the technique, but I like it.

*Knot Weed is an invasive species but my parents have a small well contained stand of it on the farm. I hate it and we’ve tried to eradicate it a few times, but it takes years of dedicated effort and likely poison to get rid of it. Which honestly would leave a barren hole in the garden. But the reason it is well contained is that it is next to their house, there is a cellar entrance on one side and an entrance to the house on the other side. The lawn side gets mowed down regularly. My Dad also regularly goes in and cut the whole stand down to the ground.

from Wikipedia:
Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone or focused, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one’s sense of time.[1] Flow is the melting together of action and consciousness; the state of finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is. It requires a high level of concentration. Flow is used as a coping skill for stress and anxiety when productively pursuing a form of leisure that matches one’s skill set.[2]

Flow state is that feeling as an artist where you are focused and in the zone, and I believe we can train ourselves into achieving it. This is why I believe in regular artistic practice and not daily for most creative people. Daily is prescriptive and rigid. Regular allows for flexibility and spontaneity. Regular practice means that it is part of my day and part of my routine, but it means that if I skip the practice I don’t beat myself up or even feel guilty for missing a day. It means that I can come back to the practice (whatever that may be) when I’m ready.

It also means that I feel good about my practice when I do it, I’m not doing it in drudgery or guilt.

Getting to flow state can take time, and if I’m working out of drudgery or guilt, I’m not going to get there.

For me getting into flow state means that the 30 minutes I set to work moves quickly, or slowly, depending on the work. Usually for me, getting into FLOW makes time feel fast. When I work in flow state, I feel competent and the works feels like it’s gone fast. I know in my videos I’ll state, wow that went quick.

I believe that the regular work of going to the same area and working in similar materials regularly, assists me into getting into flow fast.

In my post “Buttery Next Steps” I mentioned that oil pastels have a shelf life- Paul Rubens goes from buttery and smooth to sticky and less pleasant. My conclusion is that they are a use it or lose it material.

I’d like to amend this to, it depends on how you store them.

I store all of my art supplies in my basement studio in latching totes. They aren’t perfectly air tight, nor are they watertight, but they are close. I store my work art materials in less expensive non-latching totes. 

In both cases I use a variety of sizes. A large difference is that at work, while in use the materials often sit without a lid but in the tote. While at home, my oil pastels get the lid put on them every time I’m done using them.

The work oil pastels are mostly, but not every box, much stickier, especially with an unwrapped stick than the oil pastels at home. Even the same brands have differences. While the Paul Rubens pastels at work were sticky and kind of gooey in how they moved the home version was just as slippery and soft as the day I bought them.

The difference is drastic.

This image was made with the “work” oil pastel. The layers are thicker and stickier.

This image was made with the “home” oil pastels. I used Mungyo and Paul Rubens. The layers are thinner and smoother, though there is still texture. The texture is intentional.

I’d like to also point out the temperature differences in my home studio versus my work studio. My home studio is cooler than the outside temp in the summer and remains pretty cool all winter. Humidity is controlled by a dehumidifier in the summer. My work studio… Is warm all winter and humid in the summer though we have 2 dehumidifiers running it’s humid. The AC is controlled by others, and doesn’t always work for the basement printshop.

These are Mungyo gallery oil pastels. They are the only pastels in my air tight container that got harder over time. they were also much more firm than other brands.

The differences in the 2 locations in terms of heat/cold and humidity are pretty drastic. I think my tendency to keep my personal oil pastels in an air tight container, born largely out of organization and storage needs rather than thinking about how the materials would act or survive if in an air tight containers

Mont Marie. Soft silky smooth, even after over a year of storage. Also, available in a tin and not quite as smooth as Rubens or Lightwish.

​I chose air tight (mostly) containers because I want all my paper stored in air tight containers. Sometimes I forget to empty the dehumidifier and paper can mold but also it can retain smells. I’m not sure there is much worse than opening up a package of musty smelling paper.

If you are interested in seeing my posts a month earlier, check out my Ko-Fi account and consider buying me a coffee.

One of the things we talk about in art therapy is how the very materials we use can impact the emotional state of a client. Depending on the person’s needs you assess and offer a material.

Materials are classified as controlled or loose. Controlled materials are things like pencils, pens, and markers. Loose materials are things like watercolors or regular clay. Of course there is a whole range of materials in the middle- things like acrylic, gouache, or tempera paints. Where would we put oil and chalk pastels? Or paint markers?

These designations get even more complicated when you layer in a person’s capabilities and skill level with a material. Most days I’d say gouache and acrylic are pretty controlled for me. Most days I’d even think that watercolors are something I have a lot of control with.

But then there are days when I don’t have control.

Case in point:

A few weeks back my DayJob announced internally a bunch of changes, the one I can now talk about is the closure of our film school program and that 2 of my friends are getting laid off.

BIG DEEP BREATH

Exhale

This obviously impacted me pretty deeply, I have mentioned in a few videos that I felt like I was mixing mud and that the watercolor and media felt out of control. I painted and used too much water and the color dripped down the paper in a way I had not expected, but normally would have, and felt frustration.

When the materials don’t match our mood, it doesn’t fit our needs, and it leads to frustration and art that doesn’t feel like it quite fit. But match the material to the mood and feeling? That’s where the magic lives.

Lately my en plein air bag has gotten heavy with additional mixed media materials. I keep adding to my materials that I might want to use, despite the fact that when I get out there I use just a few. This problem is compounded by the fact that I picked up the Soola pouch. It encourages maximalism over minimal supplies.

​The decision paralysis over basically my entire studio out there with me wasn’t helpful at my goal of quickly (30 minutes-ish) capturing the feelings of a spot.

So in these videos I limited my supplies down to:

• Water soluble graphite crayons
• Water soluble charcoal pencils in fun colors
• Some sort of water soluble colored pencil
• My own walnut ink and acrylic ink
• Some Inktense
• Water brushes

I didn’t use everything, I started out with water soluble pencils and the graphite crayons and added in as I wanted color or something that matched the feelings.

​I also chose to work 9×12 inches with a taped border.

After this I switched things up and decided I REALLY need to lighten my load out- it has to now fit in my Vernon Trunk Bag for my bike. I switched everything out to my cardboard pochade box, which works REALLY well. Shockingly well. I’m going to make a whole video about building one.

The thing about working with just a few materials and focusing only on values- dark and lights means that I can not worry about mixing colors and matching them or not. When I was using the Seami kits I used a pale pink and purple color for the beach and honestly it’s perfect. I’ve got to remember that pink is a good color for the beach.

Using minimal materials also means that the images feel more low stakes, at least to me. I don’t get stressed out at the idea that I might want to sell these images (though I’ll totally sell them if any one is interested.)

Anyway, here are the videos:

https://youtu.be/uBfQl_FxJBg

https://youtu.be/9EBEfGZb–A

https://youtu.be/NuJMYqcrLF0

https://youtu.be/zKjyNFVjZTU

I think the simple and few materials really helped to loosen me up. I’m going to keep this in mind as I struggle with adding more and more to my bag.

This is a bit of an unformed series of thoughts that I’ve been having. Last year my perimenopausal symptoms hit a tipping point- I couldn’t sleep. I had a month where I got maybe 2 or 3 hours of sleep per night. My brain was one giant fog and my memory was shot.

Let’s not talk about my mood. I mean, I was cranky AF.

I finally made an appointment and my primary care suggested progesterone and perhaps later other forms of HRT.

Immediately my sleep improved.

My brain fog improved.

My mental state improved.

However through all that, my motivation remained low, and my knee was still killing me.* Exercise tapered off and I learned that I do not respond well to long term low level pain.

​I recently started riding my bike again, both my regular bike and my eBike. My knee is still not perfect, and likely never will be again, but the benefits of riding definitely outweigh the twinge I feel here and there as I up my mileage.

The reason I’m posting this HERE and not on my Less is More Healthy Vlog is because I’m riding my eBike to work every day and I’m figuring out how to cut my art supplies down so I’m not totally weighed down.

The rule:

• Everything MUST fit into my Po Campo Vernon trunk bag. (No affiliation, just a big fan of their bike bags.)
• Exception: paper can go into my pannier bag.

My small pochade box fits into the Vernon bag. It’s compact. It also allows for me to fit some additional art supplies in the bag. My red or green kit fits.

I decided to work lightweight for my current set up. I’m using my cardboard pochade box, postcards, watercolors and a handful of colored pencils and inktense pencils. I tossed my Soola** bag in there too.

So far it’s working well.

The picture is of my regular bike, not my eBike. I bought it shortly before I tore my MCL last year. It fits me really well and there is nothing quite like a bike that actually fits me.

*I think I detailed it here, last summer I tore my MCL and kept tweaking it.

** The Soola bag is a maximalist bag and I don’t even have mine completely filled. It’s heavy but for now as I test it out, it’s in there.

Youtube fed me a million and one videos about the Arrtx watercolors over the last month. I know this is because Arrtx is heavy into getting their products into the hands of influencers and youtubers. I am unsure what their review terms look like but given that the reviews and videos all premiered around the same week made me think that Arrtx pushed for them to come out on the same day/week.

Anyway, I bought my set on a Prime Day deal. They were about $21 and regularly are $26. The set contains 24 full plans of color that are pretty normal colors for just about any art style. The range of colors leans toward the warm side and has only 3 shades of green, though enough blues and yellows to mix plenty of shades of green when needed. There are the usual shades of brown, orange and red. There are 2 shades of magenta and one violet.

Let’s get the negatives out of the way. The set is labeled as non-toxic but there are cadmium colors in the set. Which cannot be. Another youtuber contacted Arrtx and was informed that these are HUE colors and not true cadmium colors. Which tracks, no set with true colors could be this cheap. A single pan of real cadmium red/orange/yellow would cost $20. The various pigment colors for the cad colors are also for the cadmium hues and not true cadmium colors.

Another mis-label is the cerulean blue, it is the wrong color blue and does not granulate. It is instead a blend of pthalo blue and titanium white. Violet is labeled as PV23 which is Dioxazine Violet but it does not behave like dioxazine violet. It stains and doesn’t move on the page the way my other dioxazine violets behave. It does mix as it should but it’s off. I don’t trust that the purple is true dioxazine purple, and the downside of that is that the other option is a fugitive pigment.

IMO the Payne’s Gray acts more like a neutral tint than payne’s gray.

For the positives, the various shades do mix as I expect the various colors to mix. The various blues and browns mix to make nice grays and browns. The yellows and blues make the usual greens. The magenta shade mix to make purples and to dull down green and blue. The violet mixes with blue and other colors to make deep darks.

The colors rewet really really well. It’s easy to get a strong and intense color as well as thinner washes of color. The pan size means you can really get BIG brushes into the colors, allowing for larger paintings. 

The range of colors is also great. The black could have been replaced with white or something else. But a good black is always good for Notan sketches and other value studies. I have been able to mix almost any color I need from this set. The set isn’t super deeply pigmented but at $21-$26 a set it’s a great value.

The intensity of the colors is good but not as great as say Holbein, which is a high standard, but you can layer the colors to get additional intensity. I did find that the colors layered pretty well and lifted when I needed and wanted them to. They also moved on the paper as a professional watercolor does- that is to say they use something to create flow.

So who is this set for? I think if you are new to watercolors this is a good set to get you started. It’s got a full range of colors that mix as they should, even if the colors are mislabeled for their hues, they mix as they should for hue pigments. It’s a large amount of paint for a low price. It’s good to learn with. The pigment load isn’t the same as with professional paints, but it doesn’t have that pudding like texture that paints have when they are filled out with a huge amount of chalk. That is to say that for the most part they behave like typical watercolors.

This is what I’d consider a starter set that serves as a good base for someone to replace the colors as used with good professional colors. The huge amount of paint means that someone can do a lot of en plein air or art journal pages and not run out of paint. I’ve made 7 images- 3 postcard size and 4 larger 8×10 inch size and barely made a dent in most of the colors. The colors I’ve really used the most are Indian Yellow, rose, ultramarine, pthalo blue, pthalo green, olive green, yellow ochre, and raw sienna, raw umber, and burnt umber. I have made an utter disaster of the storage box they arrived in. I am using them with a small plastic tray to use as a mixing well. They would fill a pretty decently sized tin.

Overall, I’m really impressed with the way these paints behave especially at their price point. The big question I have is about their labeling and if the pigments are true.

I have been searching for the perfect commuting bag for awhile. When I was in grad school I happened upon the Osprey FlapJack version 1. At 21l it was great for my needs at the time. BUT as I have become more of a working artist I needed something a little bigger. Plus I had worn out the fabric on the back of the bag, and no matter how much I repaired it, it continued to wear and tear. *

I knew I needed something larger, so I picked up a 27l Decathalon bag, I forget the name of it, from Walmart and it was okay. But it didn’t have the features I really wanted. It was a smidge uncomfortable.

Then I decided to turn toward Topo Designs. Outside of Tom Bihn, I really like their designs and also their colors. The colors they chose are really great.

I got their Rover Pack Classic. It was spendy, but also seemed like it might be the right size. It turns out it’s wrong for me in so many ways. It’s a simple deep pocket of a bag with no organization and it’s back at 21l. It’s also HEAVY.

So I ordered the REI Co-op Flash 22 pack. In Pride colors of course. It has a lot of what I like- a little bit of organization, it’s super lightweight. BUT It doesn’t hold my tablet, and LOL at even attempting at holding either my personal OR my sad little work laptop. That said it is PERFECT for a hike or bike ride where I don’t want to carry ALL MY STUFF.

Enter the clearance and last sale of the Topo Y-pack. A bag designed to be minimalist and lower on the price scale than most of their other bags. It’s still good quality but the details I liked about eh rover pack aren’t there. That said, the simplicity and size of the bag are what make it better. Apparently the original design of the Y-Pack were much smaller, this one clocks in at 24l- which might be the happy medium of sizes for me. It’s got the external water bottle pockets- I carry a water bottle in one and a tripod and reusable shopping bag in the other. These pockets are also great for umbrellas. It is yet another single deep pocket. I remedy this with a bag-in-bag organizer. I can fit my tablet or laptop in the sleeve inside as well as my clipboard and a book.

It’s also a blank canvas. I have a couple of thoughts on customizing the bag, which I feel okay doing as I picked it up off Topo’s trade in site Re-Mapped.** I want to add a bit of organization to the inside as well as patches and pins on the outside, and maybe add some accessory loops.

*Yes I know I can return it to Osprey for repairs and replacement. BUT It was also too small.

** No affiliation just happy to see a spot where I can order used stuff that is in good condition.

The algorithm has me in it’s clutches. It knows what I like. It knows what I’ll impulse buy. EVERYTIME. I impulse bought then waited for almost 2 weeks for my package to arrive.

Inside were 4 packages of SeamiArt thematic watercolor sets. each one unique- skin, morandi, candy, and ocean and forest. Each set has 12 half pans set into a plastic holder which was then set into a card sleeve. The sleeve has no information about the colors or about the paint. Nor does the listing.*

To get started I’d classify these paints as firmly in the adult coloring sales demographic. They are also dupes of a brand called Prima that makes similar themed sets. These dupes are all over the place and available from MANY other brands. Seami just happened to have the cheapest set available on Aliexpress.

I’m not generally a thematic set kind of person, BUT I wanted to see how these sets performed. I hot glued my sets onto a heavy card and then into this small “nice box” to make a travel set. I also glued a sheet of yupo to the lid to make a mixing area.

In short- much like the Grabie set I have mentioned in the past. They rewet really well, have a decent amount of pigment, the pastel colors are cut with a LOT of filler that has a recognizable feel. They benefit from a GENEROUS pre-misting before painting. But overall the colors work well with one another and shades you expect to get from various colors mixed are there. The ultramarine blue mixes well with the umber to get a gray. The reds dull down the greens, the yellows mix with the blues as you’d expect. Over all as far as student grade colors go, these aren’t half bad, with a few caveats.

The pastels colors in the morandi and candy set use quite a bit of filler, and now that I know what that filler is, I know how it feels on the page. Clay** probably kaolin clay. Clay is a pretty standard filler that lends a flat matte appearance, bulks out the color, and allows for mixing of a color into something more pastel, without using something (expensive) like titanium white. It also preserves some of the transparency of the color. HOWEVER, it really impacts the flow and movement of the color on paper. 

The end results of this filler is that the paint acts a lot like gouache on paper but isn’t fully opaque. Adding these colors to other less filled watercolors dulls them down in a way that often looks muddy. These colors also feel harder to control, because they aren’t behaving as one expects watercolor to behave.

Though, if you’ve used children’s watercolors recently you’ll know exactly that feeling of clay filler. It’s one of the things gives children’s watercolors that gummy consistency and why they don’t flow around the paper. 

Which is also what makes a lot of these cheap watercolors so great for coloring books.

It does beg the question- if I add a flow agent to these watercolors will it improve the flow? 

Anyway, can you make art with these sets? I think it would be really difficult to make anything with just one set. The sets lack a contrasting color or colors that can mix to create true darks. IN order to do that you need to buy 2 sets. I think the 2 most useful sets are Skin and Ocean and Forest. With those two sets I’ve been able to get a really good range of colors for landscapes and skins. One of the big drawbacks of the skin set is that it lacks purples or blues for shadows. The other two sets area great for painting distant trees and land. The pale colors can have other colors added to create a broader range of pastel shades.

Another drawback to these sets is that you can’t get a refill of just one color. You’d have to buy all 12 colors again. I’ve been hitting the sap green pretty hard and I know it will be the first to disappear.

So here’s the big question, would I buy them again? No, but mostly because I’m not into themed sets and there are colors in these sets that I’ll probably never use. I spent under $20 so it’s not a huge waste of money. I also, outside of Beam paints, really prefer to get tubed watercolors and make my own pans.

Who do I think these are for? I think these would be a good gift for a high school artist, or if you know someone who is into adult coloring with different materials. A friend of mine tries all kinds of different materials to color their books with. These would also be great for the art journaler who wants a bunch  of colors available but are on a tight budget. Even then I think the MeiLiang sets are a better budget friendly choice.

Meiliang (now owned by Paul Rubens? Always owned by Paul Rubens?) performs more like a traditional watercolor. It doesn’t have a lot of filler and rewets like a dream. I think if you are looking to bulk out a watercolor collection Meiliang is a better choice.

I don’t have any affiliation with these brands, though I do have affiliate links with both Aliexpress and Amazon, links that give me a few pennies if you buy but costs you nothing expres.

*These are now listed on Amazon for almost $20 per set. The Amazon sets do have a tin. But the sets are also available on Aliexpress with a tin for about $10.

**I recently found out that  The Art of Soil paints that I bough use clay as a primary component to all their paints, which explains why I don’t like them