Seascape Artist

Every painting book I’ve ever read encourages us artist’s to make color charts. I almost never make any … never have … probably never will … BUT … one exception to that is that I wanted to see how the ink colors looked on my watercolor paper using my Dr PH Martin’s Bombay India Inks … so tonite was the nite.

While I wait for the phone call from my daughter telling me how the championship football game went … are they going to win or lose? Going into this game, they have been undefeated all season! I am hoping that they will win tonite – this is his last year playing football in this league and he has really improved a lot – good coaches this season! Next year, he has to try out for the team in jr high school! Anyway … tonite I created my version of a color chart for my india inks.

As you can see, I did not make it in those little boxes from light to dark or dark to light in nice neat little rows carefully labeled with every variation I could possibly find from the colors … I used the ink to create something that I might actually put into a painting … I wanted to see how it would look … what color when wet … and what color when dry. Little box blobs are not going to help me later on when I am trying to decide what color to use for one of my whimsical palm trees … they are not blobs in boxes … they are living changing tree designs that appear depending on the brush, the color chosen and my mood as well as the amount of paint put on the brush and how hard I push the brush against the paper.

This particular color chart will be much more useful to me when I am trying to remember exactly what the difference is between crimson and red [not really much at all between these two!] and the difference between tangerine and orange [tangerine is much redder but both have very good color and would be perfect for flower petals].

If you are going to make yourself color charts … I really recommend this approach … paint things as you would paint and label them if needed … normally it does not matter to me and I do not need to know specifics but I am working on a large project of whimsical palm trees and on some, I want to know before putting the ink on the paper … you may find that becomes an abstract painting that you had not really intended painting … I enjoyed creating this abstract color chart tonite … I can put it in a frame as a piece of art here in my studio and leave it on display for reminding me of the colors when I need to know … it became a whimsical art project that is quite functional as well as interesting objects.

Today was experiment with the Grumbacher MAX Oil Colors day. I had not used these paints before – I bought them awhile back but just had not had the time to work with them. My grandson came over today so I got them out and we used them to paint on stretched canvas.

I did not have any larger oil paint brushes that I am used to using – I threw all my old ones out last September when I moved because they were so worn out and I had not used them for a couple years. I planned to buy new ones but I had not done it yet. I was sorry during painting that I only had the small brushes that are for oils or acrylics – I am used to using bigger brushes for painting with oils.

They thinned very nicely with water and they had the same soft buttery feeling as the oil paints I have used. We created the beginning under-painting for a seascape – I was teaching my grandson about using oil paints, primed pre-stretched canvas as well as about how I start a seascape painting. The canvas is drying now and I will use the paints probably next week-end to put in some more color and to paint at the horizon line.

Clean up: The paint came off my hands and palette quite easily using Dawn dish soap with water.

If you are wondering how I got paint on my hands, it was from trying to get the paint out of the brushes. I wiped the excess paint off the brushes with a paper towel. I found it impossible to get all the paint out of the brushes even using dish soap – I did not let them soak in soapy water for a couple hours or so being natural bristle brushes – that was the only thing I did not try. I finally gave up and threw the brushes away. I am thinking I need to get some actual real Brush Soap to use to see if that will work to get the paint out of the brushes for me. I had dish soap in the house and it never even occurred to me to consider that I might need special brush soap to get the paint out of the brushes.

I will not be buying expensive brushes to use with these paints yet anyway until I figure out if I can get the paint out of them … so it will be the cheapest house painting brushes I can find … at least with cheap brushes that shed with oil paints … any shed brush hairs will probably come off the canvas much easier than they did using watercolor paints on watercolor canvas IF these paints behave similarly to regular oil paints, which they appear to do so far with the exception of getting paint out of the brushes.

The great news was that we had a good time painting with them.