What I’ve been up to: Close to Home | Atlantic Canada Mixed Media Artist

Myself and a friend won a spot in Michelle’s Close To Home | A Watercolor Landscape Journey! So excited to be a part of this class and Michelle rocks it out! She is chalk full of tips and techniques which she demonstrates and explains so very well in her videos. I wanted to take this course–and was planning on paying for it if I didn’t win ;)–because I’ve been thinking about adding background detail to my watercolour paintings. I’ve already learned so much and haven’t even made a scenic painting yet! Maybe you should join this class too!

First thing I did was set up my tube colours in a tin. I found some old tube Daler Rowney colours that had been my husband’s in art school and added these to my bits of tubes and QoR colours (love the QoRs!!). Fellow artist and awesome person, Karen Campbell, has shared her travel supplies in a video (which you should watch!).

I got the sweet idea from her of using gum containers for paint pans. So much cheaper than buying pans online (there are very few downsides of living in Canada but one is lack of art supply availability). Besides, I’d rather spend the money on paint than pans right now. 😉
Here is my current travel stash. The brushes are Neptune Princetons and I love them! They aren’t travel friendly though unless I take a big tube to put them in so for now it’s my small W&N Cotman brush and my Pentels. Check out those gum pans in the lower right. Sweet, right? Totally hooked on colour charts suddenly. I recall making a colour wheel with gouche in first year art college and it was painful!! No brush marks allowed! Ugh! I have steered clear of those wheels since but this brought the love back again. I have learned so so much about my paints and how the colours relate to each other by placing them in a wheel. I loved this exercise so much so that I made four wheels! One for my 24 Grumbacher set, one for my W&N travel set and one for my various tubes including the QoRs. Then, since my W&N travel pan set and tube tin will be coming with me I decided to combine the colours from both of these into one wheel for when I want to take both sets with me. Overkill? I think not! I’ve learned so much already about these paints and am much more familiar with matching the colour to its name now. I’ve also noticed that even though I have some duplicate paint colours, they are slightly different depending on the brand and if they are from a pan or tube. I will be printing smaller versions of these wheels to put into the kits, as Michelle suggests. She’s the bomb, btw.

On our FB group someone questioned why the use of the word ‘hue’ for some colours and not for others with the same colour name such as Cadmium Red and Cadmium Red Hue. I’d been wondering that myself and Michelle posted a great article on it here and I found another here that lists the toxic paint colours and added it to my BuJo for reference. Dig it.

I’m usually not so keen on the slow side of planning and learning. I just want to get down to it! But with years comes wisdom and I’ve learned that taking the time to learn means taking less time later to figure things out, the why and where.

So, if you are hankering to take this class just click on the links at the top of this post. You won’t regret it. 😉

Until next time, happy creating!!

Moongirl ❤ ❤ ❤