Books, recipes, photos, knitting, watercolor and just general information on art and living. Book reviews from Amazon.com and other publications from time to time
Icon artists, illuminators and others interested in historic pigments for various reasons (such as reproducing the type of paintings done by the Old Masters in the same materials they used) are being served by various companies that make natural and obsolete pigments used in paint formulations.
For watercolor, even in the last 30 years, pigments have changed dramatically. For example, I could still buy genuine gamboge, a yellow pigment from a latex-producing tree of Asia, genuine vermilion, a somewhat fugitive red-orange mercuric pigment and genuine Rose Madder as well as true Manganese blue. Now, no one makes Manganese blue as it is a very polluting metallic pigment; vermilion darkens over time, gamboge and madder fade. Madder is still made by the original method by Winsor Newton and is still beautiful. Others imitate it (Rose Madder Genuine by Daniel Smith) but none has the true red color of W/N's special formulation.
Now, Daniel Smith and others make pigments from ground gemstones, but Rublev (naturalpigments.com) makes the old style paints found in Russian icons and the 18th and 19th century Old Master watercolors. I've been testing them out and they are quite interesting, but..not what you'd expect.
I'll put up reviews of the colors, swatches and my findings in blogs to follow.
It's a BEAUTIFUL BOOK. Click that link to read reviews.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Exetazomichanophobia n.
Fear of using search engines. A word I invented to explain the phenomenon of posting a question on a forum to which you can Google the answer but you unaccountably do not, even though you are demonstrably on the Internet and you can use a computer and even a forum.
Using some stashed Kroy sock yarn, I knit up a design of a Turkish sock.
This is designed from Zilboorg's "Fancy Feet" and is done on the fly--a bit tight in the leg but very pretty. As with a lot of Turkish socks, hard to put on but the fit is fine once you get there. And pulling it off is best done by grabbing the heel.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The winter watercolor class ended 3/4/2009 at the Gibby Center for the Arts in Middletown, DE. In case you don't know, the Gibby is a combination teaching center, studio and gallery on Main Street, next to the venerable Everett Theater. If you've seen "Dead Poet's Society", a film with Robin Williams and Robert Sean Leonard, you've seen the Everett.
Five classes is just enough to get a taste of watercolor--the real learning happens when you repeatedly put BRUSH to PAPER and PAINT. We covered materials, paint characteristics, paper, how to draw if you don't know HOW to draw, washes,, successive layers of glazing, composition, and how to paint faces and figures (Jellybean figures and faces.) But we didn't even have time to get to color harmony, palettes, the chemistry of watercolor painting, and much more. We'll cover more of that in the Spring class, which will focus on getting what you envision from your head to the paper and dealing with the accident-prone nature of watercolor.
I posted a video of how to paint a small painting (ACEO or card-sized) of a watch. Funny, there was a billboard up on 95 in Wilmington some months after I posted this on Youtube, and it looked a LOT like my painting!
Until the Spring class, I'll be posting some lessons here, and eventually we'll move to a better website for the class, but my Blogger is handy right now.
Meanwhile, my class asked for a reading list and here it is:
This is a great book for learning about color, layers, and consistency of your paint washes and glazes. For some reason, it is out of print (!!!) and I suggest you get a copy even at this price before it becomes scarce.
This is Charles Reid's new book, has all kinds of stuff, from going from photo to painting, and Reid will LOOSEN you up like no other person and help you deal with accidents.
I'll post more demos, comments and other things in coming weeks, and if any of my STUDENTS want to post some of their work here (I saw some nice stuff from everyone!) email me and we'll do it.
This is from my watercolor class at the Gibby Center in Middletown, DE. We were doing a lesson on loosening up, and this was the example I painted in class for my students.
