Back in August I joined the online group The Documented Life Project at Art5Academy. It is a free, year long art journaling project that gives you weekly challenges based on media, technique and subject. You upload your pages and get feedback from other members, and it seemed like a good "starter" idea to do in addition to my fairly large sized canvas paintings that I've been working on... for a while! I hope to get a show of them in a temporary gallery next door to me on Main Street so I need to finish them up. But sometimes I feel the need to take a break from them.
Of course the "DLP" project had been going on since January and I joined in August! They work in one of those large Dylusion sketchbooks and I'd recently bought one. I didn't necessarily intend to go back and do ALL the previous challenges, but left room in my book and have sort of been picking or choosing the older assignments as I go along. This challenge was from January and called The Color Wheel, but I saw most people hadn't done a literal color wheel, so I decided to take a cue from Sonia Delauney's work and the "Orphism" movement and did this piece above in watercolor. (I'm pretty sure Delauney did the piece below in guache)
I'd also recently bought a set of Peerless Water Colors I'd seen around online. I know Jane Davenport uses them and has created her own palette of them. These were developed in 1885 by Charles Nicholson.They are 6"x2.5" pieces of paper - like blotter paper - imbibed with highly intense pigments. Touch them with a damp brush and you get an intense water color. The back of the papers show an approximation of the color and have the name stamped on, but the front pigmented side can look nothing like the resulting color at all! Viridian Green looks like iridescent purple!
I bought the basic color little booklet plus the Bonus pack totaling about 55 colors. What most people do is to cut a small square of each of the colors and glue them into a paper "travel palette", identifying the colors below - I can see why they do this because these things are dangerous! You get any dampness near them and they run - even touching them with your dry fingers ends up with colorful fingers! So I put the remains of the papers away in a waterproof pouch. When I run out of a color on my palette I can replace it with a new square.
You can see how "bleedy" they are! I decided to make a smaller accordion book - easier for travel. Each page has to be protected with a plastic sheet so when its folded up they don't touch each other. I'll have to say making the palette took forever! So... I thought it deserved a nice cover:
I keep it in a plastic sleeve and carry it with my smaller Moleskine journal and a Pentel Aquash water brush (these are great if you haven't tried them!). Trouble is all this has diverted me from my "real" paintings which I really do need to get back to!
Comments