News — paint

It was a forehead smacking moment. It took me much longer than I really want to admit in this eternal forum of public-facing internet to realize that the letters in pigment names stood for colors. PB meant "Pigment Blue," PR was "Pigment Red," and so on. But that slow dawning of realization also meant that I will never, ever forget what those letters on my tubes of watercolor paint mean. All watercolor paint is made from powdered pigment, a binder (typically gum arabic), additives and/or preservatives, and water. You can buy the individual parts and mix your own watercolor paint if you...

Ultramarine Blue is in my top 10, probably top 5, favorite watercolor pigments. It's a single pigment color with awesome granulation, and I love to use it with a burnt orange or raw sienna to make interesting neutrals. It's a very "standard" color--it came with all the initial sets of paint I bought when I was starting my watercolor journey in earnest: the Winsor & Newton Cotman palette, the Holbein set, and the Sennelier. I also have it from Daniel Smith and Shinhan. In my handmade watercolor sketchbook, I have a few pages of paint comparisons since I have duplicates of many...

How did a beat up old, nonstick cookie sheet become a permanent fixture in my art room? "Billowing Clouds" was created with an old, battered baking sheet and experimentation with a non-traditional painting process: monotype. Monotype is actually a printing process, where a single print is taken from ink or paint spread on a flat surface. For this one, I squeezed pure indigo (always a favorite of mine), gold ochre, and maroon perylene pigments onto an old nonstick baking sheet--also a bit of a break from tradition since monotype is usually done on glass or an etching plate! Next I...

Orange & blue is one of my favorite color combos to use in my abstract work. Color theory tells us that complementary colors mix to make neutrals, and I've had the best results with blue and orange. Red and green (or more accurately, in my experiments, viridian and a cool red) often work as well, but I've had zero luck finding a pleasing combination of purple and yellow. And I've tried! A LOT. Instead, purple and yellow just make mud, almost without fail, and the worst part is it's not even interesting mud. It's just ugly brown. Give me a lovely granulating...

I'd heard the word before; I knew it was a color. I knew it was dark; it was often used in reference to night, or ink. Indigo. It was the first watercolor pigment I fell in love with. It was so bold, so strong on the little swatch card I was making. At the time, I was still struggling to get rich colors from my little dried out pans of watercolor, and the intensity of the color immediately grabbed me. I started collecting the color in all the brands I came across. I have it in Winsor & Newton, Daniel Smith,...