Sometimes when you don’t feel like painting or don’t have the time to work on a painting, it can be helpful to just play with color mixing; this is also great for a beginner in watercolor (or any medium!) or if you haven’t touched them in awhile and feel rusty.
Watercolor practice mixing - pages 1+2 of sketchbook
Here is my small field sketchbook opened up to show you my color studies. I wanted to experiment with greens and then various blues for landscape painting. It can be great fun to do this, it’s relaxing and loosens you up with the paints. I find it good practice to try to copy from life, that is the landscape right in front of you, but also from pictures of paintings you like in books.
Watercolor - practice mixing - pg 1
I made this nice and big so you could read my notes, I abbreviate the names of my colors and put (+) plus signs where I mixed a new color in.
Watercolor practice mixing - pg 2
The blues at the bottom of this page are from looking at watercolor paintings and trying to copy the color and study how the artist (A. Heaton Cooper) made it look like water.
Having these pages in my field sketchbook is great reference when I’m in the field painting or at home in the studio, you can refer to your color notes when searching for the right color. This was a great exercise and glad to share it with you, give it a try no matter what your level of experience, remember even virtuoso violinists warm up and practice their scales everyday!
an article about watercolor mixing I’ve allowed to link here.
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I really love seeing this! I have just recently purchased some “artist grade” watercolors in a minimal palette (honestly, I could only afford 6 pans). I spent most of today just playing with them and seeing where they can take me. I think I picked a great set of colors.
I would love to see a more methodological approach to these color studies! 🙂
Hi Adrienne! Thanks for stopping by, I’ve been so busy I haven’t posted in awhile. I’m glad you bought ‘artist grade’ colors, I checked out the sets you showed on your blog and they looked like a lot of color but really I think they’re just tinted up so it seems like more color. Do you know what I mean? I haven’t really done a post with a methodical approach, I’ve just had time to share my step by steps when I’m painting which should be helpful. My advice is to play with your colors and label what little puddles of color you get with your micron pens. Go on a color treasure hunt…take them with you and try to imitate colors you see, then label what you used to get them! Good luck!