Just a quick blog post this week, as I'm busy spring-cleaning the studio and prepping for lots of new artwork. I'm also getting ready to take part in PleinAirpril, a challenge created by the US-based artist community, Warrior Painters, to encourage people to get out and paint en plein-air (outside), every day during the month of April. As one of my aims this year is to get out and paint more often, I thought this would be a great challenge for me. I've decided to primarily use watercolours, although I've found a brand new type of paint from Schmincke called Horadam Naturals that I'm giving a go too, as well as dusting off my very underused Derwent Shade and Tone Mixed Media set. In preparation for my outdoor exploits I've swatched all these supplies, so read on if you'd like to take a look.
My comfort zone when sketching outdoors is a fountain pen and ink. I love the simplicity of just taking one pen and one sketchbook. I also tend to use a water brush with water-based inks and this gives me a range of tones without hatching. Sometimes I use water soluble pencils, but again I often just use one or two colours to simplify the process.
In the pictures below, you can see the main range of sketching techniques that I use when out and about on the Isle of Man:
One of the aims of PleinAirpril, is to encourage artists to experiment and use mediums that they aren't comfortable with. In response to this, I'm going to be using a much wider range of media than I usually do, including the Derwent Shade and Tone Mixed Media Set, which you can see swatched below:
This set is a fantastic mix of some of Derwent's most popular ranges, including Graphitint and Inktense, in pan form and wonderfully earthy shades. If you'd like to see a review of this palette then I can recommend the Owings Art Derwent Shade and Tone Mixed Media Set review. The theme for this year's PleinAirpril is 'City, Forest, Ocean, Mountain', so these shades and textures will be very suitable and I can't wait to give some urban sketching a go in our island's brand new city of Douglas!
In addition to the Derwent set, I've also curated a travel palette of watercolours along with some new paints, called Horadam Naturals, that are meant to be somewhere between watercolour and gouache in characteristic. I've given them a try and I love them! I saw some very mixed reviews from the few that are so far available on YouTube, with people often not liking their slightly gel-like texture. I love their texture though and found them to work well when mixed with traditional watercolours, so I've added them to my travel palette.
As someone who's interested in the history of colour and pigments, I was delighted to see that the Horadam Naturals range contains natural and heritage pigments, including a Rügen Chalk pigment, that fits in very well with the blog I recently published on the colour Greenish White. Greenish White is a colour that was referenced to calcite, a mineral found in chalk, so I had to give this colour a go. I also bought the Madder Lake and Lalvarit Violet, both beautiful colours, which you can see swatched out with the rest of the palette below:
I think these palettes will give me more than enough choice when out and about painting in the next few weeks.
I've been researching various other artist's plein-air setups and found some very good advice on the Sarah Burns Studio YouTube channel, especially the video on her favourite plein air set-ups. I also found an interesting explanation of the term 'en plein air' on the Tate website.
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