Visited Kremer today

Kremer watercolor palette
Visited Kremer Pigments today and bought an empty compact watercolor palette and a few other things. I was given a discount because it was slightly dented. They had a few free handouts including one for the recipe for making watercolors which I’m including here (by the way, you can buy their own handmade watercolors in pans and they are not too expensive).

    The classical watercolor medium is Gum Arabic.

  • Heat 40 parts distilled water in double boiler.
  • Add 20 parts Gum Arabic (63300)
  • Stir to dissolve.
  • add 1/2 part Glycerol (64900) as a plasticizer.
    This keeps the finished paint from becoming too brittle and cracking.
    Add more if you plan to pour the paint into pans, so they retain some moisture.

You can use any color concentrates of choose a pigment according to you technique, use transparent ones if you prefer light washes and opaque ones for gouache.
Mix pigments into a thick paste with the Gum Arabic soluction and ditlute with water for use as needed.
Note: The Gum Arabic crystals may take 1-2 days to completely dissolve.

Book recommendation:
Watercolour Painting

Landscape Palette

Mason Dumond Palette

Mason Dumond Palette

I prepared this palette for Thomas Torak to give a critique of landscape paintings at his class at the Art Students League tomorrow as he usually does each year when Spring arrives. Tom has helped push my art forward the past couple of years and I’m grateful for his instruction. I was taught to prepare this palette years ago when I had the fortune to be a student of Frank Mason and it comes down from his teacher, Frank Vincent Dumond.
Something of an aside, it occurred to me in the process of preparing the palette, the great variety of hues that exist between red-violet (alizarin crimson) and blue-violet (ultramarine blue). In fact perhaps more than our vocabulary takes into account.
Munsell Color Wheel
I have a Munsell color wheel in my studio and looking at it seemed to bear out that thought. It is simply and logically organized. What I noticed was that between yellow and red (two of the three primary colors) is yellow-red. For this hue the English adopts a new word, “orange”, rather than simply calling it yellow-red. However between red and blue (also priamries) there are THREE hues instead of just one and only one of those hues gets the distinction of having a new hue name: violet, the other two hues being red-violet and blue-violet.
My point is that there is a great variety between red and blue which doesn’t seem to be taken into account in our language and therefore not our thought or perception as well. The Munsell system does however take this variety into account. As to whether the Munsell system is a more accurate or useful tool for artists will be the subject for a future blog post.
The Munsell Color system has become a standard in the graphic industry serving as a “measuring stick” so to speak, upon which different parties can agree upon and providing consistency. Read more about the Munsell Color System at the website for the company created by the man himself Albert H. Munsell, at munsell.com
I’ve posted thoughts on the Munsell Color system before on my older blog which you can find at this address wlmosley.blogspot.com.

The Artist Who Invented the Internet

Samuel Morse by Daniel Huntington

Samuel Morse by Daniel Huntington

This past weekend I had the opportunity to visit the Princeton Art Museum (for the first time) which is presently showing an exhibition entitled Picturing Power: Capitalism, Democracy and American Portraiture. which inspired this blog post.
It is generally considered that the internet had its beginnings at universities, where machines, with no processing capabilities of their own – basically a keyboard, telephone coupler, and printer – connected with “mainframe” computers. Then computers, following given protocols, networked between each other and the number grew and subsequently the world wide web came to be. But if we stretch our imagination back further, we could say that the laying down of the Atlantic cable was the harbinger of our modern-day, instantaneous communication – the Atlantic cable enabled instant communication between continents which until then could only happen by ships carrying messages, which could take weeks.
Atlantic Cable

Atlantic Cable Projectors by Daniel Huntington

The Atlantic Cable used the telegraph, invented by Samual Morse, who was a painter of equal status to the great portrait painters of his day, a fact which has been somewhat lost in history. He is remembered today for his device which used Morse code, translating electronic impulses into language. (a fact testified by his monument located in Central Park)
Samual Morse monument

Samual Morse monument

Simply put, different combinations of dots and dashes, short tones and a long tones, were created to represent the alphabet. Pushing a button creates a sound, releasing the button causes the sound to stop, so the telegraph works by on and off states and therefore it can be said to be an early form of digital code.
You may say, fortunately today we receive our information plainly without having to decipher code, but ask a computer programmer and he (or she) will tell you that underneath the text and images that you view is code. This code works by mathematical logic, which is the marriage of language and math, perhaps a seemingly incompatible combination, but one that enables computers to do all they do. The alphabet of our keyboard has assigned to each different character a corresponding number, a binary number. Underlying it all is the binary code which correlates with electronic on and off impulses, not unlike Morse code.

This is a painting I did of Samual Morse’s beautiful home on the Hudson River in 2006.

Locust Grove by Walter Lynn Mosley

Locust Grove by Walter Lynn Mosley

Using Gouache

William Trost Richards (American, 1833-1905). "Cloudy Day at the Shore". Gouache and watercolor on paper. c1875.
William Trost Richards (American, 1833-1905). "Cloudy Day at the Shore". Gouache and watercolor on paper. c1875.

I’ve taken up an interest in learning how to paint with gouache of late. I’ve used it to a limited degree to retouch watercolor paintings that I’ve done in the past, but recently I decided to see if I could do a complete painting with gouache. On Sunday I had the humbling experience of doing a complete failure! Today I spoke with some friends who have experience with painting gouache and was given some good tips, basically you should paint it like a poster, “flat”, no layering of paint, no blending, etc. So I did a quick figure study and the medium seemed all of a sudden to be more cooperative now that I was armed with this new, vital information.
An artist who was quite adept at using gouache was William Trost Richards – here is a painting on toned paper. This is quite a lesson on using the medium and it has many general lessons that artists of all mediums would do well to head. Most of the tone of the painting is determined by the tone of the paper. Where there is painting it is super economical, no fussing (gouache is a medium that seems to go downhill the more you fuss with it). Notice the economy of the whites to indicate the light through the clouds in the sky, just put in nice and opaquely, very simply, and then left alone. And then just enough hints and colors to give the viewer the idea of the scene and the figures in the landscape painted with great economy, but throughout there is a sureness of draftsmanship, and again, economy of means – again, I’m very impressed by how much the tone of the paper does the work for the viewer, expressing so much.

Nya Patrinos Mark-making Journey: Erik Tiemens Workshop – Concept Design Academy

Nya Patrinos Mark-making Journey: Erik Tiemens Workshop – Concept Design Academy.

Erik Tiemens often paints on Hot Press paper. A lot of his work is dominated by blues and browns. He says you don’t need a lot of color when you are doing a tonal comp. He lets his medium be loose. His materials of choice are gouache, ink and watercolor on tone paper.

He also uses blocks of watercolor papaer. He focuses on negative and positive shapes. He suggests that you shouldn’t get bogged down in details. He says when he was younger he used to do very detailed line drawings. He also has done a lot of master copies. He like Zorn. He also liked to make color paintings from black and white photos as an exercise.

He has a warm up sketch technique were he explores different compositions rapidly.

He likes the California Regionalists – Emil Cosa. They capture vitality and regionalism.

He thinks painting from life helps build the artist.

He likes to paint in the afternoon because there is more contrast.

He suggests trying different formats.

He paints in his car. He pushes the brushstroke in his digital work. He uses the dimensional oil painting brush in painter. He also says he can build up a set in sketch up and then move it to painter or photoshop.

Oil Painting Influences are Constable and Turner. In those days you would do a series of paintings at once.

He mentioned Bill Perkins as an influence.

He says if you aren’t painting in watercolor or gouache that limited palette sketches in markes is a great way to learn.

He plays with painting really soft because sometimes pencil drawings make you seize up. He likes to do paintings with Prussian Blue and Black. He mixes watercolor and gouache.

His art process can be very experimental – scubbling, rinsing brush and drying it off, pull highlights, build up darks.

He starts his paintings starts rough and moves to more solidified.

He likes Linsky Hair Brushes (6-8 fine tip) that he gets from Blick also Windsor Newton Series 7

He uses big brushes to block in and uses filberts to suggest people, animals and old boats.

Art History Influences

Albrecht Durer (he mixes very detailed with very loose)
The Dutch would sketch outside and draw outside and then oil paint in the studio.

Corot – tonal sketches with gouache and chalk

the Dutch Masters had a concept of the sublime in the landscape. They would travel to Italy and create a huge portfolio

Folds

Leonardo Study of Drapery

Leonardo Study of Drapery

Folds are caused by tension points and compression as the fabric tries to conform to the form that is beneath it. The tension points may be from one fixed point to another, such as the shoulder to the elbow or the waist to the knee; or it may be from one fixed point to the end of the fabric where the influence would be gravity, such as from the waist of a woman’s dress or from the knee of a pants leg. These difference would cause different types of folds to occur, another factor is the nature of the fabric itself – the weight and thickness of the fabric.

It is to our benefit as artists to become familiar with type of folds that we can identify so that we’re better able to represent them and to interpret them when we encounter them. George Bridgeman, an instructor at the Art Students League, has identified 7 types of folds which can be found in his book Complete Guide to Drawing

Seven Laws of Folds

Another great reference with information on folds is the Famous Artists Course