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Vegetable Color Wheel
This week’s watercolor sketching subjects quickly became a healthy meal. Before becoming a meal, the vegetables were a great way to revisit basic color mixing and elementary, easily overlooked watercolor practices – Keep your water clean. Keep your colors clean. Keep your highlights. The veggie motivation came courtesy of a Jean Mackay class via Winslow…
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The Color of Maps
The next few posts are going to include how color was introduced to the genre of maps and charts. The earliest maps were used for storytelling and wayfinding on land and at sea. Military planning and plant hunting were specialized areas using early colored maps. In the 1780s the profession of ‘topographic artist’ was introduced.…
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Getting Started
When starting the watercolor sketch for this post it was to explore the three watercolors that made it onto my palette when I first started watercolor. The plant I chose to sketch is – Akebia quinata or 5-Leaf Vine. Synchronicity set in … it was 5 years ago that I took my first ‘encore’ /…
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The Perennial Daisy
A patch of daisies has started to bloom in my city garden, and I am prompted to make this cheery flower the subject of this week’s color exploration. The prompting came from a variety of angles. Jean Mackay posted an image done in negative painting technique on IG that encouraged slowing down to paint, I…
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Lettering Lesson
Adding words to a sketch is a good practice to understand so Jean Mackay provided us with a few tips for hand-lettering during the Nature Sketching workshop in Italy. I am not much for adding phrases into my work but some simple steps for making lettering look polished were welcome. We spent about 20 minutes…
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Lessons Learned
After a week of staying at a stunning castle in Italy with the camaraderie of a dozen like minded watercolor sketchers now is a good time to reflect on lessons learned… and to imprint those lessons into my daily sketch routine. This was a Winslow Arts Center workshop; Nature Sketching in Italy with Jean Mackay.…
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Italian Earth Colors
Raw Sienna. Burnt Sienna. These earth colors are associated with the Italian landscape and essential for a palette used for nature sketching in Italy – our color topic today. Jean Mackay is leading a Winslow Art Center workshop in Italy where I hope to up my skills in composition and page refinement while sketching outdoors.
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The Colors of Plum Jam
Color week 33 features the color mixes for ‘Plum Jam’. It is jam making season and here we have 3 jams with distinct colors along with distinct [and delicious] flavors. Mixing the colors included a base jam tone and building from that base, much like making the jam itself. The grid comes from my wonderful…
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Drawn To Class
To keep up with daily sketching means that ‘every day’ I need to put something on the page. Some sketches take a couple minutes, a ‘sketchbook’ entry typically takes 45-50 minutes and a botanical drawing can take many hours. So I’m always looking for new ways to fill the page of my ‘daily sketchbook’. When…
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