Scribblings in my Dina Wakley Media Journal

I've been dipping in and out of this journal - not really making layouts sensu stricto but using it more like a sketchbook of sorts, but including in that, collage, acrylic, watercolour, sewing etc. For the uninitiated, the journal is comprised of 4 signatures, each of which has pages in "watercolour paper", burlap, thin canvas and a thick kraft process paper. The "watercolour paper" is variously described by Ranger/Dina as "handmade cotton rag" watercolour paper and watercolour paper that "contains some cotton", so I'm still unsure as to what it really is and it sure doesn't feel or work like any watercolour paper I've ever known, but I do like it for mixed media and acrylic painting. Ranger's marketing has not helped and I know of lot of fine-art watercolourists have felt let down by it - myself included - but I make use of things and seldom bin anything, so I decided to use it for something today! 

NB: the intention of these two pieces is as part of my roadtesting of the journal - how well it copes with thick, dimensional acrylic vs retarded, watered acrylic. They're really just backgrounds that I will ultimately add to and/or work over.

Abstract Blurred African Landscape (through the eyes of a cheetah) (acrylic on paper)
Ok caveat - this is about as authentically African as an Arbroath smokey, and it's probably ecologically bollocks too, as I've put the cheetah in the wrong landscape but who cares! I wanted to show something ultra-basic and simple, and loosely inspired by African artwork, specifically acacia trees on the African savannah, which appear in a lot of work by South African artists. I then wanted to blur it and add movement, as though seen by a fast-moving cheetah or a person in a car, whatever.

WHAT I USED:

Ranger Dina Wakley Media Journal (BUY NOW USA, UK)
(I used one of the righthand pages, and a "watercolour" page specifically - no preparation e.g. gesso was used)

Daler and Rowney CRYLA artists' acrylic paints in:
   Titanium White (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PW6 Titanium White]
   Ultramarine Violet (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PV15 Ultramarine Violet]
   Rowney Emerald (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PW6 Titanium White, PG7 Phthalo Green (Blue Shade), PY3 Hansa Yellow 10G]
   Golden Yellow (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PY73 Arylide Yellow GX, PO62 Benzimidazolone Orange H5G]
   Quinacridone Burnt Orange (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PR206 Quinacridone Burnt Scarlet]
   Quinacridone Yellow Red (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PR209 Quinacridone Red]

Golden Artist Colors Universal Acrylic Polymer (GAC-100) (BUY NOW USA, UK)
(you could use any fluid, retarding acrylic medium really)

3/4" Golden Taklon paintbrush
(I used one that cost less than £0.30 from a cheap multipack - it doesn't need to be anything special!)

Plastic plates/bowls to mix the paints

Container of water to wash the brush, and a supply of paper towel or a rag to clean/dry it on.

WHAT I DID:
STEP 1: CRYLA paints are very heavy-body and need to be thinned for a technique like this, so I put out each colour pace white into separate containers and squirted over a little GAC-100 and then mixed it in to make a texture more like a fluid acrylic. I did this such that I still had about 25% of the paint of each colour in the original format, so I could mix them to vary thickness when painting. I did not add any GAC-100 to the Titanium White.

STEP 2: With my brush wet, I picked up some Ultramarine Purple and applied a basic and rough sky. I then used Quinacridone Burnt Orange to produce a tree trunk and branches, and some soil, which I then overlaid (the soil) with Golden Yellow and Quinacridone Yellow Red. I worked as much as possible in only horizontal or vertical stripes and did not mix colours in advance, I let things blend on the page. I then added Rowney Emerald to make the foliage of the acacia, using the brush vertical to pounce the colour onto the page. I added a little Golden Yellow in places to add interest. 

STEP 3: Using side-blending (i.e. half the brush covered in Titanium White, the other half in a colour), I blended "light" into every shape, coming from the top left of the page. I then continued this with white "motion blur" across the page, letting it take up colour with it. Wash the brush immediately! Allow the page to dry for about 1h before closing the journal - the paints will be touch-dry in that time but will need 48h to cure fully before you can apply any media over the top.

A Tribute To Mrs Wakley (acrylic on canvas) NB: just a background, not a finished work!
Whilst Dina Wakley's aesthetic is quite far from mine, I really admire her use of colour and bold, vibrant, geometric patterns combined with scribble and perfect imperfections. I wanted to capture a little bit of this on a canvas page in my journal - the page is unfinished, I'm not sure what I'll do with it thus far! I picked the orange and violet paints as they reminded me a bit of her Cheddar and Blackberry paints (I don't currently have any of Dina's paints).

WHAT I USED:

Ranger Dina Wakley Media Journal (BUY NOW USA, UK)
(I used one of the righthand pages, and a canvas page specifically - no preparation e.g. gesso was used)

Plaid Folklore Heart Layering Stencils (BUY NOW USA, UK)
(this set include grid and heart stencils and a heart mask - you will need just the heart stencil and grid stencil for this project)

Stampers Anonymous Tim Holtz Bubble Layering Stencil (BUY NOW USA, UK)

Daler and Rowney CRYLA artists' acrylic paints in:
   Titanium White (BUY NOW USA, UK)
   Ultramarine Violet (BUY NOW USA, UK)
   Cadmium Orange (BUY NOW USA, UK)
(pigment information can be found for these paints in the supplies list for the above project)

Palette Knife

3/4" Gold Taklon paintbrush
(I used one that cost less than £0.30 from a cheap multipack - it doesn't need to be anything special!)

Container of water to wash the brush and a damp rag to clean the palette knife.

WHAT I DID:
STEP 1: I started top-right using the grid stencil and my palette knife loaded half with Ultramarine Violet and half with Titanium White so that I could get a fade/blend. I covered the stencil really thick as CRYLA has enough body to act like a texture paste and I wanted dimension.

STEP 2: I hung the heart stencil off the page and painted it in with a brush using side-blending (see above technique) with Titanium White and Cadmium Orange just to create some texture and depth. I then washed the brush immediately.

STEP 3: Using the bubble stencil, I applied some violet then white then orange paint, using my palette knife just like in Step 1 but with a bit less height to it.

STEP 4: Leave to dry. As the paint is thick and CRYLA takes about 1-2h to dry and this height fully, leave it open for that time then allow 48h to cure before painting etc over it.

Tiptoe through the tulips - acrylic on burlap

No, dear readers, I am not going to inflict upon you the true horror that was Tiny Tim. I'm instead going to inflict upon you the true horror of a little scribbling I did in my Dina Wakley Media Journal on Saturday night just before bed. I wanted to use one of the burlap pages and I had seen a pretty burlap painting of some waterlilies that Dina had painted last month, and it inspired me a lot - mostly the colours - to try painting on burlap again. As it was close to bedtime, this really IS just a sketch!

"Tiptoe Through The Tulips" (acrylic on burlap)

WHAT I USED:

Ranger Dina Wakley Media Journal (BUY NOW USA, UK)
(I used a righthand burlap page - you will want to put some plastic or acetate under it as paint will go through, but that could also make a cool grid-like background on the next page if you want)

Daler and Rowney CRYLA acrylic paints in:
   Titanium White (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PW6 Titanium White]
   Quinacridone Deep Purple (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PR122 Quinacridone Red]
   Permanent Violet (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PR122 Quinacridone Red and PV23 Dioxazine Violet]
   Yellow Green (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PY74LF Arylide Yellow 5GX (lightfast version), PW6 Titanium White, PG17 Chromic oxide]
   Cadmium Yellow (BUY NOW USA, UK) [PY35 Cadmium zinc sulfide]

3/4" Golden Taklon paintbrush
(these are cheap - don't use costly brushes for acrylic painting, no need!)

Water and a damp rag to clean brush

WHAT I DID:

STEP 1: I sketched a couple of vague tulip-flower shapes (or maybe they are poppies?) with a wet brush and the Titanium White and then filled it in with the same colour blended with both of the purples, to give light at the top and shade at he bottom. A little yellow at the very bottom of each flower created brown, which helped with shading. 

STEP 2: I sketched the stems and leaves in white again (I didn't bother to clean my brush at all during this painting, so some purple carried over), and then overlaid them with green and yellow. I also added some "ground" by just mixing all the colours ad hoc below the stems.

At each step, I roughly cleaned my brush on the edges of the burlap, to give it some shade.

Inspiration for my French Café art journal layout - and some progress!

I could not resist tinkering with my plaster wall background this morning - I grabbed my Archival Inks in Coffee (BUY NOW) and Wendy Vecchi's Potting Soil (BUY NOW) and the French Elements 8" by 8" stencil by Andy Skinner for DecoArt (BUY NOW). I added a thin layer of each, very softly blending them through some of the elements of the stencil - first using Coffee and then Potting Soil - and then edging the page gently with each of them just to add a bit of tone to the edges and cover some of the gaps in the background. The Ranger Mini Ink Blending Tool (BUY NOW) has been getting such a hammering this week - I've had to buy 2 new packs of foams for it! I've now left it for 24h to see what comes to me. You may notice in the photos below that the opposite page is now a pale shade of pink? This is gesso, would you believe? I wanted to have something tonally similar - it will be a different layout of course - and I achieved this plaster-like gesso layer by mixing my usual cheap white Daler and Rowney Simply Acrylic Gesso (BUY NOW) with a small amount of DecoArt Fluid Acrylic in Quinacridone Gold (BUY NOW). This gesso IS a bit low on pigment but to be honest for a big 500mL tub for £5 or US$10 kind of price range, I don't mind applying 2-3 coats! This Quinacridone Gold uses pure PO48 Quinacridone Gold as the only pigment - which in watercolour, I associate with a wonderful and vibrant gold-yellow-brown with a lot of tone and depth - but as acrylic mixed into gesso, you get a kind of plaster-y shade of pink and it worked pretty well for covering this page up. There was a bit of black Dylusions ink in the spine so I blended it into the wet gesso with my brush to give the background a bit of extra tone.

I think I've gone mad and it's all Wendy Vecchi's fault - she's created a monster since telling me to try her spattered plaster technique, which I've tweaked slightly. I've since made this beautiful background in my Dylusions journal using an extension of this method that used 11 different Archival Inks to get just the right look - and there's a new background technique coming up later tonight!

The idea of a French café that I had has crystallised a bit more in my mind today. I was trying to think of a quote an immediately a lyric that has haunted me for well over 20 years came to mind, since I first heard it on a Piaf compilation album belonging to a friend (back in the days when we still called them "records").

Shine another glass, make the hours pass

It comes from the song "Lovers For A Day" recorded by Edith Piaf in the 1950s. The original French lyrics "Les Amants D'un Jour" (which translates to almost the same thing - "The Lovers For One Day") are as follows, with a literal translation by myself - I do find that singable translations of French songs lose quite a lot sometimes of the original emotion and meaning. In essence, this song is about a young couple who rent a room for a day so that they can sleep together, and their tragic ending. In the original French, the genders of the two young people are not specified, so it's possible of course that they were a same-sex couple persecuted by the world who wanted somewhere safe to be together and then end their lives before rumours spread? Or maybe it was a boy and a girl from different classes or religions? It's a very enigmatic song and I do enjoy it. The English translation that Piaf released had slightly different lyrics and specified that they were a male-female couple - so I prefer the original as it has more mystery and can mean what you like. It's in the key of D minor, which always sounds melancholic but enticing to me - I tend for some reason to find songs in D minor interesting for some reason. I have wondered if it's the key I speak in naturally or similar as it seems to really stand out to me.  You can hear her English release here:

Literal translation of "Les Amants D'Un Jour", original lyrics by Claude Delecluse and Michelle Senlis. Music by Margeurite Monnot. Copyright © 1956 (renewed 1974) Editions Paul Beuscher.

Les Amants D'Un Jour

The Lovers For One Day

Moi j'essuie les verres au fond du café J'ai bien trop à faire pour pouvoir rêver Mais dans ce décor banal à pleurer Il me semble encore les voir arriver... Ils sont arrives Se tenant par la main L'air émerveillé Comme deux cherubins Portant le soleil Ils ont demandé D'une voix tranquille Un coin pour s'aimer Au coeur de la ville Et je me rappelle Qu'ils ont regardé D'un air attendri La chambre d'hôtel Au papier jauni Et quand j'ai fermé La porte sur eux Y'avait tant d'soleil Au fond de leurs yeux Que ça m'a fait mal. Que ça m'a fait mal. Moi j'essuie les verres au fond du café J'ai bien trop à faire pour pouvoir rêver Mais dans ce décor banal à pleurer C'est le lendemain qu'on les a trouvé... On les a trouvé Se tenant par la main Les yeux refermés Vers des lendemains Remplis de soleil On les a couchés Unis et tranquilles Dans un lit creusé Au cur de la ville Et je me rappelle Avoir refermé Dans le petit jour La chambre d'hôtel Des amants d'un jour Mais ils m'ont donné Le goût du bonheur Et j'ai leur soleil Tout au fond du coeur Qui me fait si mal Qui me fait si mal. Moi j'essuie les verres au fond du café J'ai bien trop à faire pour pouvoir rêver Et dans ce décor banal à pleurer Y'a toujours dehors «La chambre à louer »

Me I wipe the glasses at the back of the café I have too much to do to be able to dream But in these banal surroundings I cry I still seem to see them coming They arrived Hand in hand The air rapt with wonder Of two cherubs Wearing sunshine They asked In a quiet voice For a roof [place] for their love In the heart of the town And I remember How they looked With a tender air The hotel room With yellowed paper And when I closed The door on them There was so much sunshine Deep in their eyes That it hurt me That it hurt me Me I wipe the glasses at the back of the café I have too much to do to be able to dream But in these banal surroundings I cry It was body-to-body That we found them We found them Holding hands Their eyes closed Against other mornings Filled with sunshine They were lying down Quiet and together In a hollowed-out bed In the heart of the town And I remember Having closed the door At daybreak The hotel room The lovers for one day But they planted Deep in my heart A taste of their sunshine And so many colours That it hurt me That it hurt me Me I wipe the glasses at the back of the café I have too much to do to be able to dream But in these banal surroundings I cry It is always outside "Room To Let"

How much does size really matter?

No, I don't mean men's willies, I mean size as in sizing on/in watercolour paper!

When paper is manufactured, sizing is added to reduce how much water the paper will absorb. Unsized papers are basically kitchen paper and so on - very absorbent and of course useless for art. Drawing papers are slightly sized ("slack sized") and have a bit of resistance to water, but watercolour papers are much more "hard sized" to make them very resistant. Now, within watercolour papers, we often refer to some as "hard sized" to mean "very hard sized" whereas the weaker sized watercolour papers are still "hard sized" in the context of all types of paper.

When paper is being put together, sizing can be added to the pulp, which results in "internal sizing", or, onto the surface ("surface sizing" - the latter is the much more water repellent form of paper.

In this video, I compared the following - the manufacturers are indicated as follows:
[DR] = Daler and Rowney
[SCM] = St Cuthbert's Mill
[C] = Canson
Chemical Pulp:
Aquafine Hot Press. This is a fairly low-end student-grade paper, which I only use for swatching normally [DR].
Optima This is not a watercolour paper - it's a mixed-media paper that I just added for a bit of a laugh really to see how it performed [DR].
Bockingford Cold Press. This is a very good paper that I use day-to-day [SCM].
Langton Rough. This is again, a decent day-to-day paper [DR].

Cotton Rag:
Langton Prestige Rough. This is a generally good paper that is a very good entry-level-to-cotton-papers paper, for people who are moving up from chemical pulp papers [DR].
Saunders Waterford Cold Press. This is pretty hard-sized and a very high quality paper [SCM].
Arches Cold Press. This is quite hard-sized but ultimately no more so than Saunders Waterford [C].
Millford Cold Press. This is almost an "extreme sized" paper, with a very strong surface sizing. There is nothing else like this  on the market [SCM].

I did my tests using French Ultramarine by Winsor & Newton in one of their large pans - these are VERY economical and well worth having for the colours you use the most:

Amazon USA No stock at the time of writing.
Amazon UK £20.99 £15.10
Amazon Canada No stock at the time of writing.
Jackson's £20.99 £13.64

Mini-Haul!

A little break before I upload the next instalment of my stamping paper product comparison - a mini-haul!

I actually went to Hobbycraft in search of some velum or some 12 × 12" decorative paper that I could use to make some custom envelopes for forthcoming birthday cards and gifts for friends. I ended up discovering some great deals on brushes from Daler and Rowney! I don't normally buy 'good' acrylic brushes as they end up knackered, but they had some CRYLA (the professional brushes) for less than half price, and, due to a pricing error on the till, I saved a lot more! Love it when shops make mistakes in the customers' favour - were it a tiny art shop, I'd've gone back and told them, but I don't feel anything towards the big chains tbh.

CRYLA brushes are a very stiff synthetic brush suited to heavy-body acrylics in particular, that are designed to look like a faux natural fibre - no idea why, that makes ZERO difference to performance and who honestly cares what colour the fibres are when they're covered in paint most of the time?! Weird...

DALON brushes are a soft, thirsty synthetic brush designed as a mimic sable, with each fibre having a pointed tip, so that they are like hairs. This makes them look darker at the ends.

I got the following - I've linked to Amazon UK for them as Hobbycraft don't sell them online - note Amazon currently have a sale on too - the prices are at the time of writing! 
CRYLA Size 4 Fan Blender  - RRP normally £7.75 - Amazon presently £6.21.
CRYLA 1/2" Flat Glaze  - RRP normally £15.75 - Amazon presently £11.93.
DALON Size 9 Round - RRP normally £9.75.
DALON Size 12 Round - RRP normally £14.00

CRYLA Size 4 Fan Blender and 1/2" Flat Glaze. DALON Size 9 and Size 12 Rounds.

I have not used CRYLA or DALON brushes before, so I'm excited to be trying these out and comparing them with other brushes I do commonly use.

I also picked up a  Cotman Sketcher's Set for £8.00 - it's normally £16.00 in there and £18.75 on Amazon - but the good news is they have it down to £7.79 at the moment too! I don't use student-grade watercolour as a rule, but I needed an en plein air solution for this summer and time is ticking. I was going to buy one of the W&N Artist Grade pan sets and fill it with my 24 main colours by buying empty half-pans and pouring my own using the tubes I already have...but the more I thought about it, what I really wanted to do was to keep the set on me at all times in my work-bag with a bottle of water and my sketchbook and I just couldn't see myself painting regularly en plein air if the paints were expensive. I also was realistic with myself - I don't have the time to sit around outside painting beautiful paintings! What I need to do is to sketch outside and then do bigger paintings with artist-grade paints back in my studio where I can do a better job of it. As such, my en plein air set didn't need to be fancy and a Cotman set would suffice!

This set contains Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Yellow (Hue), Alizarin Crimon (Hue), Cadmium Red, Phthalo Blue, Ultramarine, Viridian (Hue), Sap Green, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber and Chinese White. I'm going to add some more colours and remove some - like the bloody pointless white (I HATE white in sets!) - to get it down to 4 versions of each Yellow, Red and Blue - a warm, cool, neutral and earth. No need for the greens as I can just mix them myself. Looking forward to trying it out next week, though, with the colours I have at present!

Product Review: Sennelier Abstract Acrylic Paints

My local art stores only stock Daler and Rowney (which I like CRYLA and System 3 ranges of) and Pip Seymour (which I dislike - they have a nice range of earth colours but I dislike the almost jelly-like texture some of the colours have) acrylic paints - so when the local big-box store started selling Sennelier Abstract Acrylic Paints, I was intrigued. None of the colours were ones I really needed, but I don't have a neutral gold so I picked up a pack of 028 Iridescent Gold for a mere £2.00 - it was on sale and is normally £4.00 there, and on Amazon UK it is £7.63, so this was a pretty good saving! When I got to the checkout, I was given a tiny pack of 385 Primary Blue for free as a sample. When I did my test comparisons below, I had assumed this would be either a Process Blue (i.e. Cyan) or a neutral blue, like a Cobalt Blue (Hue) - so I used the latter (System 3) for comparison. When I read the package and realised it was a Phthalo Blue (PB15:3 Phthalocyanine Blue BGS), I thought that calling it "Primary Blue" was a bit stupid - every painter the world over knows Phthalo Blue would be called Phthalo Blue, right? I don't get why they didn't use the normal name. I used System 3 707 Rich Gold as the comparison for the Iridescent Gold as it was the only gold I had to hand.

Sennelier Abstract are sold in pouches rather than tubes and come in at 120mL (4 US fl. oz.; 4.2 UK fl. oz.) - so let's normalise that to a current Amazon UK price of £6.36/100mL. In comparison, System 3 707 Rich Gold is £5.52 for 150mL (5 US fl. oz.; 5.3 UK fl. oz.), which normalises to £4.60/100mL. CRYLA 707 Rich Gold is £9.25/75mL (2.5 US fl. oz.; 2.2 UK fl. oz.), which normalises to £12.33/100mL:

Normalised prices:
Sennelier Abstract 028 Iridescent Gold = £6.36/100mL.
Daler & Rowney System 3 707 Rich Gold = £4.60/100mL.
Daler & Rowney CRYLA 707 Rich Gold = £12.33/100mL.

That puts Sennelier Absract halfway between the two in terms of price. The paint coming in pouches intrigued me - not as easy to store as tubes I guess. The paint is marketed as a "heavy body" paint but to be honest, even just feeling it through the packaging, it's really not - it's a little heavier than System 3 Standard Body but nowhere near as thick as the Heavy Body or CRYLA versions.

So how do they look? I painted them onto Daler & Rowney System 3 Acrylic Paper with a dry Simply Golden Taklon 1" flat wash (one of my favourite ranges of acrylic brushes even though they are the cheapest things around!) to see how they came out. The advertised properties of the four paints are:

Sennelier Abstract 028 Iridescent Gold - PY3 + PBk7 (Hansa Yellow 10G + Lamp Black) on mica, lightfastness n.r. (not listed), transparent.
Daler & Rowney System 3 707 Rich Gold - PW6 + PR101 (Titanium White + Synthetic Iron Oxide Red) on mica, lightfastness ***, transparent.

Sennelier Abstract 385 Primary Blue - PB15:3 (Phthalocyanine Blue BGS). Lightfastness ***, semi-transparent.
Daler & Rowney System 3 110 Cobalt Blue (Hue) - PW6 + PB29 (Titanium White + Ultramarine Blue), lightfastness ***, opaque.

Top to bottom: Sennelier Abstract in Primary Blue and Iridescent Gold then Daler & Rowney System 3 in Cobalt Blue and Rich Gold.

So, my verdict on them. Firstly, the body really is not heavy body - they're very liquid and actually reminded me of Daler & Rowney Graduate Acrylic in that regard. The colour intensity is quite good and in the image above, I applied roughly equal blobs of each of the 4 paints - you can see the two blues have a similar pigment load, but the golds are a bit different - the Sennelier gold has clear patches of paper showing through - but the Daler & Rowney gold doesn't.

A close-up of Sennelier 028 Iridescent Gold - you can see clear patchiness where the pigment load just isn't as good and the tooth of the paper really shows through. It's advertised as being a transparent colour, so I would expect that to some degree, but not patchiness - that's not acceptable. The sparkle was pretty much as one would expect and the colour a nice neutral gold - I have no negatives I can say in those regards.

And now Sennelier 385 Primary Blue - the coverage is better here but it does seem thin in a few places - for a semi-transparent colour, that's kind of usual but I did feel it just didn't want to go as far on the page as the System 3 colours did.

Here is the Daler & Rowney System 3 707 Rich Gold (Imitation) for comparison - you can see much better coverage and even in a standard-body paint, there are clear brushmarks - a heavy-body paint should show those, which shows how totally not a heavy-body paint the Sennelier ones are. The coverage is good and even - there is no patchiness and whilst the texture of the tooth shows through, you can't physically see bare tooth.

And Daler & Rowney System 3 110 Cobalt Blue (Hue) - this still shows brush-marks like the above even though it's standard-body - there's a bit of thin, patchiness at the top left - where the tooth does show through - this is an opaque colour so it does fall down a bit on that regard but I think this is more a symptom of my brushwork as I threw this one down last of the 4 before getting something to eat!

Sennelier Abstract Heavy-Body Acrylic Paints

Packaging:

Looks: *******--- 7/10
Recyclableness: Not Known
Readability: ********** 10/10
Ease of use: ********** 10/10

Product:
Quality: ******---- 6/10 (it was pretty good in terms of the colours themselves and the pigments used, but as it wasn't heavy-body, I felt this was totally misleading - the patchy nature of the application compared to System 3 really let this paint down, too)
Value for Money: *****----- 5/10 There are better quality, true heavy-body acrylic paints with similar grade pigments available at a lower price - therefore I cannot consider this good value and the outright lie re: being heavy-body is not good at all.

OVERALL RATING: 4/10

Dog Project - Part 4 - Painting En Grisaille

So, yesterday, I kind of started again, working from a new picture of Dog and in a new medium - gouache. There are many different ways of working in gouache and I'm going to use two for this painting - the first is an underpainting, the second is the midtone method. The underpainting in this case is en grisaille, that is to say, entirely done in shades of grey and focusing only on levels. The underpainting is then overpainted in coloured gouache and this helps get the light and shadow just right.

Now, when working in watercolour, one normally mixes one's own black by neutralising a colour with its complement - a yellow with a purple, a red with a green, a blue with an orange (ultramarine and either of the siennas make nice blacks) - or, if doing a three-colour painting, you just mix your red, blue and yellow and get a black that will "sit" well with all of your colours and won't look too...well...black. If one doesn't want to do that or needs something much more black, one still doesn't reach for a tube of black paint - one would use Payne's Grey. This is a mix of colours and varies by manufacturer as follows:

Payne's Grey Compositions
Winsor and Newton, Cotman Water Colours (465): PBk7, PB29, PB15.
Winsor and Newton, Professional Water Colours (465) : PBk6, PV19, PB15.
Daler and Rowney, Artist's Water Colours (065): PBk7, PB29.

PBk6 - Shungite - this is a natural carbon mineral that contains Buckminsterfullerine - I know this cuz I have a bracelet made out of it, it's kind of "posh coal" as I think of it! It's a beautiful mineral to wear and I guess Winsor and Newton use it because of the unique properties the fullerines must give to the paint?
PBk7 - Lamp Black - powdered carbon.
PB15 - Phthalocyanine Blue - yup, good old phthalo blue.
PB29 - Ultramarine Blue.
PV19 - Quinacridone Violet. 

See the problem yet? The problem is that if one does an underpainting that contains ultramarine, quinacridone violet and phthalo blue, they will seep into the upper coloured layer and give you mud, ruining the painting. Thus, when painting an en grisaille underlayer, one has to use a proper black!

I just found this picture of me wearing my shungite (PBk6) bracelet. The large pendant is obsidian (volcanic glass) and the rest is all jet (coal). I took this photo to show my dear friend J what I will be wearing after he gets married next month, as a joke, given we have a pseudo-jealousy thing going on for the sake of banter.

The lovely thing about gouache is that you have a WHITE PAINT! No more having to remember to leave white space, you get a nice white paint instead. I have a semi-opaque 748 Zinc White , which contains only PW5 - Lithopone (a mix of barium sulfate and zinc sulfide) - cool fact - if you take any 5mL tube of watercolour and add to it 0.75mL of this Zinc White gouache, you can make yourself a custom gouache of that same shade. Cool huh? Dunno where I heard that, but it works. I can then take this white and mix it with my black - 331 Ivory Black - which contains only PBk9 - Bone Black (a kind of charcoal made from charring animal bones - it used to be made from ivory back in the good old days when people did unbelievable and unspeakable things and no one cared) - this makes a very clean black and of course, one can mix the black and white to get a series of nice neutral grey levels and it is with these that we paint en grisaille as an underpainting, safe in the knowledge that it won't give us mud!

It took me about 1h to paint the en grisaille rendering of the original image. I used my Sable No. 4 Round brush - the whole thing done with one brush - and I just really relaxed and gently painting in the shadows. I've not yet added any pure white - but I need to - I've used the paper as white, which is not correct, so I need to rectify that before I add colour. The original stopped just above the drawers with an empty fruit bowl and a phone, so I used artistic license and added a window, with a view of the park near to B's home, which I am going to add some special details to that mean something only to B and myself.

When put side-by-side you can get more of an appreciation for it - I've deliberately not done a perfect copy - what's the point? A painting is a painting, not a photograph, right? My next steps are going to be to start colouring it with gouache - I'm going to start with the view from the window which I will be using a midtone method for, effectively, as I'm only lightly sketched the trees in the distance thus far. I will then start work on the room and finish with Dog, as I've decided he would be lit slightly from behind given when the window is and it'll be a beautiful sunset outside, so that light will be warm and pink. Tune in next time to see my progress!