The Pigment Bazaar

I ordered six 5 ml tubes of watercolor paint yesterday for my palette expansion project. While trying to figure out which paints to order, I ran across an extremely useful site, Artist Pigments.org. The developers of this site have created an art material and pigment database containing as of this writing catalog entries for 78,729 art materials with color swatches for 21,203 of them. The catalog has entries for many different types of art materials, including watercolors, gouache, acrylics, oils, colored pencils, pastels and others. Where pigment information has been supplied by the manufacturer it is included in the catalog entry. Most of the swatches in the catalog have also had their color measured accurately with a spectrophotometer.

As an example, I mentioned earlier that I was interested in purple magenta which I have as a Schmincke watercolor half-pan. The entry for that Schmincke paint is here, which tells us it is made out of the pigment PR122 (quinacridone magenta). The page for watercolors with this pigment lists many different paints from lots of manufacturers. After reviewing these, I ended up ordering the Winsor & Newton Opera Rose.

The catalog is interactive and lets you save your own collections of art materials. I used this feature to save a list of paints in my current Pocket Palette and prospective paints for the Folio Palette that I am assembling.

This catalog builds upon lots of earlier work, especially Bruce MacEvoy’s marvelous site handprint, but MacEvoy ceased building out the watercolor material on his site around 2014. It is still invaluable: just today an artist with an YouTube channel about color wheels (Color Nerd) posted a video saying how the only color wheel he actively uses is MacEvoy’s pigment-based chart. I have a printout of his chart somewhere in one of my art drawers. Prior to MacEvoy, color theorist Michael Wilcox wrote a book on the finest watercolor paints, but his book is from 1991 and is quite out-of-date.

The Palette Expansion Challenge

A while back I discovered the credit card-sized paint palette boxes that are available from Art Toolkit which is a small art supply company in Port Townsend, Washington. I have been using their Pocket Palette for several years now as it fits nicely into my field art supply pouch. As can be seen in the lefthand side of the photo, I have loaded it up with 14 different watercolors. I’m wishing for more colors in my palette, so some weeks ago I ordered the largest palette Art Toolkit sells, the Folio Palette (in the middle in the photograph), and together with additional minipans (as seen at right in the photo) I figure I can get up to 30 different colors in the palette. But what do I choose? My bigger Schmincke paint box is giving me ideas. Raw umber, certainly. Perylene green, most likely. Purple magenta? It comes handy when painting the lamb’s ears flowers in our yard. Figuring out the tube watercolors I’m going to order is a good challenge.

Worm Comics

During a walk this morning I saw a worm, struggling on the sidewalk. I couldn’t stop myself; I picked it up and threw it into the grass. I’ve done this for years (during the big El Niño year in 1997-98 I had an article published in the Santa Barbara News Press about being a worm rescuer).

This evening during the SAW Friday Night Comics Workshop Sarah Maloney had us making dialog between two worms; the above is my effort.

Neighborhood Iris

There is an alleyway east of our house that runs for a block and has lots of good plants growing on its edges. Today I sketched this iris using Derwent drawing pencils, watercolor wash, and black ink linework.

Yellow Onion

This onion is from our grocery run this morning, and is sketched with Derwent drawing pencils, watercolor wash, and a bit of extremely fine black ink linework.

Colored Pencil Afternoon

I’ve been wanting to do a long colored pencil drawing for a while. I got back from Europe a week ago and the pomegranate tree is now in full bloom. It’s a tricky color to replicate: a very warm red which is almost off-gamut.

I did this drawing in two stages: first, with Caran d’Ache watercolor pencils, which I wet after several layers; second, additional multiple layers of Prismacolor. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing — but it’s a very meditative process and I’m glad I had a go.

By The Railroad Tracks

For my urban sketch today I went over towards the Davis Food Coop and admired the railroad cars along the tracks just east of the coop. I think railroad cars are interesting both to photograph and to draw. This was sketched with Derwent drawing pencils, fineliner black pens, and watercolor wash.

Picnic Day Parade

Today was Picnic Day, which is the annual student-run open house event here at UC Davis that draws tens of thousands of visitors to the campus and town. Events range from fashion shows to weather balloon launches to dachshund races. In recent years I’ve avoided the huge crowds on campus but have gone to see the parade which kicks off at 10:15 in the morning and does a loop downtown several blocks from our house.

I decided I’d try to sketch the parade and here is the result. When I was watching the parade I sketched only with a sanguine drawing pencil but took some reference photos too. Back at home I added color with more Derwent drawing pencils and watercolor wash.

Delphiniums Arrive

The planter box in our backyard has been taken over by delphiniums, which are starting to bloom now. This is sketched with Derwent drawing pencil, a 0.1mm fineliner, and watercolor wash.

Beethoventown

Bonn isn’t about to let any visitor leave without knowing that its most famous son, the composer Ludwig von Beethoven, was born here. There is obviously the Beethovenhaus which I visited today. There is a Beethovenstrasse, a Beethovenhalle, a Beethoven Gymnasium, a Beethoven Park. Shop windows of everything from Apothecaries and Antiquarians to Restaurants and Tobacconists feature his bust, his statue, or the modified smirking one at right, complete with falling-down trousers; a copy of this sits opposite me in the garden of the basement flat where I’m typing.

What impressed me about the museum visit was just how many images had been made of this composer, in an early nineteenth-century masterclass in image curation. Multiple busts, drawings, paintings, but also his correspondence with adoring literary admirers, who stoked the fire of his burgeoning fame.

I was especially entranced by Beethoven’s “last quill” — as you see below, there are no annoying feathers that seem de rigueur in period films but which get in your nose and are quite impractical, as well as being irresistible to moths. Beethoven’s quill was able to hold a fine line and live up to multiple parings, and his working and re-working of pieces was displayed in a pentimento-style buildup. (It reminded me of how Numenius and I first met online over 30 years ago now, a conversation about goose quill knives for calligraphic purposes.) Beethoven’s goose was almost certainly a greylag, which are ubiquitous along the Rhine. Of special interest to me is the length of the central slit, much longer than I was taught to cut, but if might also be damage from a later time; 200 years is an astonishing length of time for a quill to survive, assuming they’re not fibbing about it.

I leave this lovely cherry-blossomed city tomorrow for the UK and friends and relatives. I’m not sure if I’ve been able to do as much chatting with strangers as I’d hoped, but with bronchitis having walloped me, I think it’s okay.