Color Cat Studios: golden paints

Showing posts with label golden paints. Show all posts

Monday, December 16, 2019

Watercolor Fun

A nice cold day. Good for walks and fires and watercolors. It’s not often I get a chance to sit down and paint for pure joy. The other day on a walk I looked up and saw sweet gum boughs and thought, ‘I could paint sweet gum...’.

Recently I got some new watercolors that are highly sedimentary and some have mica in them to add some pizzazz. Likey! I am a tried and true fan of Golden’s QOR watercolors; they are simply the best. But recently I purchased some handmade watercolors from Ruby Mountain Watercolors and am wholeheartedly impressed!

This shows my little sweet gum design from start to finish. You would also note that you can see light pencil lines. I’m a big fan of understanding the process and love to peer into paintings and figure out how they were done. Those light pencil lines in my work are your first clue!

Testing out the paints. I always do this on nice paper and find a way to repurpose it; cards, bookmarks, ATC cards, etc.

Ruby Mountain paints. Look them up! Well worth it. I think my dive into handmade watercolors may cost me dearly....

Finished piece. :). Happy

Friday, November 1, 2019

Golden QOR Watercolors

Oh my lucky, lucky students! I have used every watercolor under the sun and when Golden Paints came out with these QOR colors a few years ago I switched without a backward glance. Perfect for professional artists, perfect for everyone else too. I absolutely adore teaching watercolor to others.

These QOR sets come ‘High Chroma,’ ‘Earth Colours’ and another one which is called something like ‘Traditional Colours.’ I have a nice set of 12 with a bigger tin. The wells are in the lid - you can see the lids have different sized circles in them. Perfect. They just make so much sense.

DID YOU KNOW.... you should never use watercolors straight from the tube? Squeeze them onto your palette and let them dry. When you’re ready to paint, re-hydrate them with a squirt bottle. If you use it straight out of the tube it will waste paint. A tube of watercolor paint, used correctly, can last for YEARS.

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Art Studio Paint

I set aside a project and the paints I’m using for it to paint a commission. There’s a subtle hint here as to what my project is!

Turkish tour

Another look at those natural color-sources. I asked about cochineal, because you couldn't just have that on a shelf, and yes, their deep reds are cochineal. It's a South American insect that is a parasite to the prickly pear. Owners deposit them into their fields, and blow them off and collect them once they're big. Then they crush their fat, bloody bodies for a nice, natural, red dye. I'm so happy to report that the rug we purchased has cochineal in it. I'm also happy to report that it's likely in your lipstick and blush, ladies, and if you drink cherry coke - it's in there, too! :)

'My' Chair

At our theatre the other night we had an orchestra meeting after I taught my sets class. After about a half hour, someone pulled me out of the meeting for a few minutes. When I came back, everyone in the room was laughing and pointing to the nice, uh, black leather chair. I had paint on the back of my shirt, and it permanently smeared all over the leather! The last time I went in the office, I noticed that someone had taped up the sign you see here. One way to lay claim to something! Well, it's not the first time, let's see, there's my driveway with many colors of paint, our carpet with Peter Pan green footprints, my car with yellow paint on the seat, my gloves, half of my clothes. It seems like everyone likes my painted clothes, kind of like already-broken-in-jeans. Maybe I should start a clothing line!