Drying Days

It reached 95° F today with 26% relative humidity. These are good drying days. But if you are neither a) drying your clothes on a line outside or b) a watercolorist this may be an unfamiliar concept. How rapidly do wet materials dry given the present combination of relative humidity and wind speed? It doesn’t seem to feature in weather websites in the United States, though I did a Kagi search on “drying days” and came up with a laundry drying guide for London. Today’s weather there was rated “Superb”.

I am now trying sketching experiments with layers where I am painting first with loose watercolors, and then drawing over the watercolor with my Derwent drawing pencils. This calls for good drying days, since the paper needs to be perfectly dry before drawing on it. Here is a sketch I did earlier today in this manner of our laundry on the drying rack.

Sketchcrawl With Waffles

As Pica related previously today we had a sketchcrawl meeting at 3rd and A Street in Davis. Pete Scully who organized the sketchcrawl said he likes sketching along A Street since it marks the border between campus and there is a lot of interesting activity at this boundary. He also remarked upon the arrival of the Little Gem Belgian Waffles shop; he quite liked the one in Berkeley but hadn’t eaten in this one yet.

I sketched the restaurant from the other side of 3rd Street and then crossed over A Street into campus to sketch the Social Sciences and Humanities Building aka The Death Star. Pica meanwhile tried one of the waffles and found it yummy.

Sketchcrawl Tomorrow

The Let’s Draw Davis urban sketchers has been for over 20 years (not sure exactly, but we participated in the very first one along with one other person, Pete Scully, who is now a personage on the worldwide urban sketchers scene).

I always mean to draw things other than people during these sketchcrawls, but it’s the one time when you can draw your fellow sketchers without getting weird looks (the couple in my drawing figured out I was drawing them and I think it made them uncomfortable, which is sad).

I’m going to take the minimal kit I took with me to Germany: fountain pen and tiny watercolor palette from Art Toolkit.

Hollyhocks

Hollyhocks are in bloom throughout our neighborhood now, including some straggly plants in our backyard. This is a sketch of some hollyhocks growing in a little public garden across the street from our house. This is my second field sketch using my new Folio Palette kit. It’s nice to have lots of colors to choose from between the 26 colors in the filled pans and my expanded colorful set of Derwent drawing pencils.

Folio Palette Is Filled

The paints I ordered for my Art Toolkit Folio Palette arrived yesterday and I have filled the palette with the 26 colors I selected. I painted a swatch chart which is to the left of the palette in the photo. I am going to mount the swatch chart on cardstock and carry it around in my art supply pouch with this palette.

The other component to expanding my field kit is adding additional pencils that are in the new Derwent drawing pencil set to make up a field set of pencils. This is a project for tomorrow or the next day.

Whole Earth Day One

Today was the first day of the Whole Earth Festival, a hippie fest that has been happening at UC Davis almost every year since 1969. The festival runs three days over Mother’s Day weekend. I walked down there late this afternoon to scope the event and perhaps do a sketch. I ended up sketching the outside of this booth displaying wares from the Harmony Tie-Dyes Company.

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.