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While in NYC to attend the Society of Illustrators Student show, I picked up a few items of note. Postcards from the Met are great to use when determining colors in a composition. They had a gorgeous exhibit on 19th and 20th century painters: Vuillard, Mucha, Sargent, Lautrec, Van Gogh, ect. I was very pleasantly surprised and awed by the touches of perfect color in the Degas pastels.
I finally found a watercolor travel kit I like, a Pentel Aquash set from Kinokuniya, which I removed the provided colors from and filled with my favorite colors instead (naples yellow, permanent red, perm alizarin crimson, venetian red, permanet violet, lavendar, antwerp blue, turquoise blue, davy's grey & payne's grey: a very earthy palette).
At the Strand, I picked up a Moleskin storyboard sketchbook, Strand tote and Lemony Snickett's The Composer is Dead, featuring music by Nathaniel Stookey and illustrations by Carson Ellis, an inspirational culmination of story, sound and visuals. When I can afford to, I'm picking up Neil Gaiman's new children's book The Dangerous Alphabet and Meomi's first Octonauts book out of sheer love.
The disassembled book on the bottom is friend's copy of Oliver Twist, which I will be re-binding sometime after the 22nd as a bookbinding demo for friends. If you're in the area and you want to know how to stitch & bind signatures as well as make a hardbound cover, let me know.
I also ended up making a set of three small hardbound portfolios: illustration, painting and black & white illustration. The pages are removable and they fit neatly into an envelope I made to protect them for carrying them easily in my purse.
Plenty of plans coming up for the summer, including teaching figure drawing, working, as well as a few secret projects. Keep up on my interests and updates on Twitter.
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5 comments:
I always have to get my watercolor palettes at Japanese book stores too. I still have the one I got in Akita :)
Hey I like your line drawings. They are very nice.
you're so handy! i wish i was there to see your demo. You should photograph the events and share it on the blog :]
Glad life's going well keep it up :D
and the Degas pastels are SOOO GREAT! one of my favorite parts of the Met. I miss NY.
HI TINA!
Does this palette tend to limit your drawings to always sort of look like each other since they're coming from this set of colors? Or is it enough to have plenty of variety? I've been fumbling around with the colors in my Windsor Newton kit for some time now and am really not liking what i mix up from them. But it could also most definitely be user error!!
Would you recommend yanking the stock colors and trying your list? Do they play nice with one another and more importantly, can they make my drawings be awesome??!
Love the new stuff!
Hope all is dandy!
X O X O X O
Hey Robb! How're you doing? Using those colors as my mainstays, I find it doesn't limit the colors of my drawings. I go all over the place with the color palettes of my drawings, limiting the colors used, and then staying within those limits. In the end, my colors tend to have a good fit with my illustrative style but that's the limits of my style, not my watercolors.
These are the main colors I end up using, but I do use others in my regular palette such as permanent yellow light & yellow grey. After that, I supplement my watercolors with a sepia ink for browns and darks, and a variety of orange and yellow inks for the oranges and yellows since watercolor in these colors doesn't stay as pure and intense as I'd like them to, particularly in how I use a LOT of water when painting. I also use gesso for the opaque lights, modified by adding slight amounts of yellow or red or both watercolors to it to warm it up. I do a lot of mixing in a tray, so the original colors are hardly ever what I end up with, proving, yes, I do like the way those color mix together.
I definitely recommend yanking the original colors and just adding your own via tube colors. I'm going to be trying out the Holbein Irodori Antique colors next, mainly for their reds and greens (which now I realize, DUH! Of course I'm going for their reds & greens). Maybe use my list as a bit of a guide for the reds and the greys and the blues. Use the other colors if you like those colors in your palettes and play with colors that call specifically to you. They end up being your favorite, most used colors in the end.
Thanks for stopping by and asking! I hope that helps!
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