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.

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