Talking the watercolour palette

Everybody who paints watercolour, hobbyist or professional, has a unique palette. As paints and pastels are my vice, I have a large collection of paints I will probably never be able to use up during my lifetime(especially because I paint smaller than most people). That doesn't make me any less aware that I will probably end up unbearably encumbered if I wanted to carry a palette of 100 different paints on a six-kilometre hike. Naturally, I end up choosing different paints for different paintings. The decision is usually made impulsively. When I am going travelling for a week, however, it's not a choice I could afford to regret any time later.

That made me purchase a small 18-well palette from a local art supply store and actually think for a while before pouring paints into it.

What would I need? I would be painting with a medium-to-small waterbrush and dried tube paints, and would mostly be painting either landscape or still life. I would probably not meet an attractive human I would want to paint, and as much as I love to paint birds, I know that I cannot hold a pair of binoculars, a sketchbook and a brush at the same time. That was quite easy to figure out. I would also probably not want to spend too much time worrying about mixes; I would prefer to be able to achieve a large range of hues without mixing any more than two colours. I actually much prefer not having to mix colours at all. Those were the factors I needed to take into account: a hue range for landscapes and still life and a relatively small need for mixing.

Then I examined my stash of paints, and poured out those 18 colours.

Probably the yellows and the reds would be quite intuitive; almost everyone has a lemon yellow and a "middle" yellow, an orange-red and a red. The split primary palette results in drab unsaturated mixes, so I did not bother to include a "cold", crimson-red. Instead I included a magenta and a magenta-violet; one can mix crimson from magenta but never magenta from crimson.

With a magenta, blue and cyan, violets are probably unnecessary in an extremely limited palette. I included them anyway and I included two of them, not because I needed them but because PV15 and PV16 are interesting paints in a wash. With most of my palette being organic, non-granulating pigments, some mineral pigments were quite helpful in achieving textural effects.

Now the blues - blue paints are my absolute favourite. Ultramarine is a staple for many painters and relatively consistent across manufacturers. I picked two different phthalo blues because I personally find PB17 more attractive than the somewhat stronger, less green PB 15:3. As for the cerulean, I wanted both the granulation and the relatively pastel quality of the paint for skies and water bodies.

The choice of greens and earths are perhaps somewhat more idiosyncratic than that of others. Some kind of a phthalo green was an absolute necessity to mix bright spring greens; I could have chosen PG7, but it was not a very useful colour by itself; the W&N Aqua Green could be used as a tint by itself, which was a factor I wanted to consider. As for Green Apatite Genuine, it both makes a good single pigment substitute for sap green by itself and granulates wonderfully without looking contrived or unnatural; the paint made painting foliage much simpler ever since I discovered it. I chose Rare Green Earth for a similar reason; potential uses in landscape painting without mixing and granulating effects.

Burnt French Ochre and Quin Orange are rather similar in hue and are both much too bright to be substitutes for traditional earth pigments, and I selected them mostly because I thought they would mix nicely with either Green Apatite or Cerulean to yield convincing dark brown colours; I do not have a large collection of dull earths.


As for the Chromium Black, I simply do not like mixing my own blacks very much and thus wanted a black that could harmonise well enough without standing out too much.

03. 03. '17: Rainbow over Telegraph

Materials: Derwent Inktense pencils and Distress Crayons on Arches printmaking paper

Winters in East Bay are much too warm for my taste, but the rainy weather alongside plentiful sunshine allows for certain remarkable moments. The rainbow I saw on February was the brightest and the most colourful I have seen in my life, and I thought I would want to capture that on paper.

11.14.'16 Sunset over the hills

Materials: Conte crayons and Rembrandt pastels on Mi-Teintes Touch sanded pastel paper
I painted this from a photograph my departmental colleague took at her research site. Sunsets really are my favourite, it is difficult to choose anything else that captures nature's grandeur in such flamboyant colours.

12.01.'16 The bay at dusk

Material: Saunders watercolour postcard paper, Mission Gold/Cotman/Daniel Smith watercolour paints, white Graphitint pencil, Derwent Inktense pencil in Indian Ink, Raphael watercolour brush
This was painted from my photograph of the golden gate bridge at dusk. I cannot say that I am especially fond of that structure, but it sure does have some poetic appeal when the sun is setting over SF.

9. 26. '16. A lakeshore view

Painted with Conte crayons on Mi-Teintes Touch paper.
Hard pastels are not as versatile as soft pastels for finished pieces, I find, especially if you do not have enough colours and must rely on layering. The colour selection of the particular set that I used(the 12 piece landscape set) was perfect for the subject, however.

Review: Mungyo gallery watercolor crayons (set of 24)

Watercolour crayons are not as popular as watercolour pencils, maybe because they are less controllable, more opaque and more liftable than watercolour pencils; they sure do require different techniques to work with. Watercolour pencils handle like watercolour, but the crayons handle more like... well, crayons that can be blended with water. The popular Neocolor crayons are smoother and can be laid down almost like a less messy version of oil pastel. Cheaper brands are somewhat different than that, and it is one of those cheaper brands that I am reviewing today.



This set contains the Mungyo gallery watercolor crayons. Pastellists might be familiar with the brand; the company is located in South Korea, named so after an old name for the Korean Ministry of Education. As can be expected, the brand contains mostly educational supplies for children and young art students, including the popular cheap sketching pastel set of 64. Like most Korean art supply brands, it pays more attention to handling characteristics than to being lightfast. Due to that, I expected the crayons to be good sketching tools, maybe not suitable for finished works but sufficiently versatile for sketchbook entries.



When opened, the box contains 24 crayons that are longer and fatter than Neocolors. The colour variety is probably not very versatile(the yellows are not well-balanced, and the ultramarine blue is not warm enough to be useful, and there is no good cold red), but as it is a good-sized set of 24, it is much less of a problem.



Each crayon wrapper bears the description "finest water soluble crayon pastel" and the colour name, in three languages(English, French and German). I do not really understand the choice of languages, as the packaging is for the Korean market, and some of the colour names do not make very much sense(you can glean them from the picture of the box). It is likely, however, that they re-package and re-sell these crayons to some other companies for the scholastic/student market; in that case, they may as well need the colour names in French and German. I did not want to pay an extravagant amount of money to unpack and examine all those products overseas, however.



I tried to lay down each of the colour and give them washes to see how they washed. The colours are not very smooth; they feel somewhat like dry wax, similar to Artbars but much harder. They handle almost like the Daniel Smith watercolour sticks, but these can be used for sketching unlike those sticks that only work on very rough watercolour papers. With a wet waterbrush, some colours dissolve easily and wash well but others still leave chunky residues on the paper, especially some of the lighter colours. Incidentially, those lighter colours were the ones I saw the most problem with when I attempted to lay them down.

The colour selection looked as if they were intended for brighter subjects, so I attempted to sketch a Sun Conure using them.



The crayons do not dissolve very well and also do not layer very well, which was problematic when trying to sketch out the darker parts of the bird. The greens did not blend well with browns, and after two or three layers they refused to layer or blend anymore, and instead formed uneven chunks that cannot easily be moved around with water. When layered sparingly, however, they are not unusable. They are less liftable than Artbars, which is quite useful for artists going after techniques that rely heavily upon glazing.



I magnified the tail feathers to demonstrate the difficulty with layering.


Overall, these are perfectly satisfactory for the price point(6~8 dollars depending on the retailer), but are not very useful for an artist not skilled enough to deal with all the quarks of using lower quality watercolour crayons. If you are working on a relatively rough paper, however, many of these issues are less problematic - but again, I would not use high-end rough watercolour papers with $7-a-set crayons with low lightfastness.

Sept 15. 'And serenity could have been bought'

Reference is from a picture I took in Palo Alto, while on a trip with family.
The hillside overlooking the city was almost strangely serene and quiet - a peace only money can buy, I would have to add as a snide remark.

Drawn with a 0.6mm gel pen and painted with Mungyo Gallery water-soluble wax crayons, on a 5cm x 7cm ATC sized Strathmore Bristol paper. The paper is good for pen and pencil drawing and for working with brushes, but not ideal for wax crayons or oil pastels. With wet media, however, it can achieve a smooth and somewhat ink-like visual effect.