COLOR!!!

Normally, I would avoid using all caps and extra exclamation marks, but this week I’ve been doused, dazzled, drowned in color and the excessive title is necessary to convey my color-drunkeness.

It all started when I recently funded a Kickstarter campaign by the watercolor artist Stephanie Law. She’d long been using a mini-watercolor palette of her own design, and I, like so many others, had coveted this dandy little paint palette. She had so much interest she started a campaign to fund the production of these palettes, and now sometime around September I’ll be getting my very own!

Because these palettes don’t come pre-filled with colors I’ll need to choose my own 36 colors to fill it with. This means buying watercolors tubes rather than the dry pans I’ve been using so far. A while back I’d received a Daniel Smith Watercolor Chart, which has dot samples of all 240 watercolors they make (!), so this week I made dark and light swatches of each color to see what ones I might want to add to my future palette.

It’s a fact that some colors make each of us instantly crazy in love. Oh, if only I could drink that color, swim in it, wear tinted glasses so it glazed the whole world! Oh, if there’s a heaven these are the colors that adorn it! And then, there’s the polar opposite colors, the horror-shows! They hit my gag reflex, make me wish I could visually purge them from my retinas, tear the color from my visual cortex before my brain can translate it. A color to make babies cry, dogs howl, and one which should only be used for cheap wallpaper in hell. It’s also a fact that the colors that evoke bliss or hate are completely dependent on the individual, so if you don’t judge my taste, I won’t judge yours!

I still have a while to wait for my palette, but I’m going to get some of these tube colors early, as I’ve been wanting to explore the difference between tubes and pans for a while. An intense shade of watercolor is much easier to achieve with the wet tub paints, and I’m hoping some of the issues I’ve been having with painting will be cleared up as I learn more about transparency, granulation, and staining with my new paints.