WATERCOLOR | PIGMENTS | BLENDING
Learning Your Craft
A creative life means touching the hearts of others
Influencing the Variables
Roxanne is teaching an exercise about how materials behave. It involves drawing a center circle for the “mother” color, sap-green in this case, which a lot of people have on their palettes. Then, in smaller circles around the mother color, will go the colors that you might want to mix with the mother—reds, blues, yellows, etc. In the outer area of the page is room for trying out the resulting mixes.
This might seem tedious, but it is so useful for creative people to try. It’s about learning how pigments, water, paper, and brush come together to create a color. This is not really a color wheel exercise but learning about how you can push the mother color in unexpected ways. There are a lot of variables, and part of the art is about learning how you can influence them in desirable ways.
Paint manufacturers produce a lot of specialty mixes so that you don’t have to, but part of the joy of watercolor is that with just a handful of primary colors, you can create an infinite variety of colors for yourself. Once you have a mix you like, you can “push” it toward one way or another to get a lot of nice variations. You’ll find color mixtures that work for you and that you use a lot.
Pigments and Binders
A big source of variation for watercolorists is the quality of the paints you buy. Student-grade paints have a wide range of quality since they contain a lot of binders relative to the pigment. More binder means less pigment, and pigment is what you are paying for. Professional grades have a lot of pigment, can be expensive, and yet can last a long time. Some technicalities:
- Cadmium-free options do not contain lead or heavy metals, which can be hazardous.
- There are pigments dug out of earth like umbers and siennas, and pigments that are produced in the lab. Thalos and quinacridones are lab-created pigments.
- Thalo colors need particular care in use. They are transparent but “staining” colors, which gives them intensity. If you need to, they can be hard to lift out of the paper completely, and they might stain your palette surface!
- Colors with the same name may vary across manufacturers. Their blends may be slightly different, and they may perform differently—sap green or alizarin crimson being good examples. If you get something unexpected, it may not be you! It may be the materials.
- Sometimes, as colors dry, they separate a little in a beautiful and compelling way. Others will granulate into the divots of your paper in a nice way. These are effects you can play with.
- This exercise will also help you learn what you don’t want to do, so it’s useful in both directions.
- Some wet-paint colors touching one another on the paper will keep their form and fuse just a little bit, which can be useful. Your paper might influence this. There’s a tactile feel to all this.
- The pans that hold the pigments on your palette are “valuable real estate.” Palette colors have to stand the test of time. You will use a few to get your favorite mixtures, the others you will use from time to time.
- You can follow your teacher’s color preferences, but these may not work for you. If you live and paint in New England, a warmer green might be better than the sage green your Arizona teacher uses.
No matter what your creative discipline is, a big part of your art revolves around the technicalities of your craft. Time spent on dance steps, chord riffs, exposure, and focal length—all of this is time well spent. You will learn what to push, what to avoid, and what to embrace. You will learn to extemporize in real-time in a way that is uniquely and artfully your own because you have had a playful intentionality about the tools of your craft in practice.
This is true in so many parts of life. Spiritually, I have practiced and extemporized with verbal prayer and embodied prayer while sitting quietly in silence with eyes open and closed and while talking to God conversationally. Before long, washing the dishes becomes prayer, encountering neighbors on the sidewalk becomes prayer, looking out the train window becomes prayer, and creating a life becomes prayer.
May your palette be filled with the colors of your life. May you learn to mix them in ways that surprise and delight you. May you have pigments of joy held with binders of love. May the paintings of your life touch the hearts of others. Amen.
This article by Medium art writer and artist Christopher P Jones advocates for slowing down a bit with the creative process…
The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.
Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, Refresh the Soul Weekly, and Episcopal Church.
Roxanne Steed is an artist, instructor, and mentor in watercolor, specializing in oil and watercolor-journal paintings in New England and Europe. Her website is RoxanneSteed.com
