What’s on my Drawing Board 11 Oct 2021

Colour swatches, new paints, acrylic flowers and illustrations.

This weeks drawing board has some colour swatches from a new watercolour paint travel set, some explorations in acrylic using dark backgrounds, and illustrations that I’m creating for a new project.

Top Row – Circular gouache swatches in my Moleskine travel book, and a large A4 sketchbook,  I got these Arteza paints last Christmas, and I still haven’t found a match for this style of paint with my own work, but I keep trying!
Concertina sketchbook, with some illustration sketches of houses; this is for a grand project I have been mulling over for a while – an illustrated novel.

Middle Row – Small Hahnemuhle A6 sketchbook with saltbush sketch completed last week at Rickets Point, using my new travel paint set by Royal Talens in their student Van Gogh paint range.

My experiments with the Royal Talens paints are going well so far, the colour mixing is really good, and I’m enjoying the spacing between the paint pans, making it easy to pick up a good brush load of paint, and the plastic mixing trays are a good size and quite deep. I’ve been looking for a good simple watercolour pan travel set, so hope this one will work out well.

Reference photo of Banksia from my garden, I’m interested in painting flowers with dark backgrounds, so am experimenting with acrylics to begin with, (I may move onto gouache!).

Bottom Row – A4 sketchbook with colour testing for acrylic painting, I painted a square with same background mix I’m using for the main picture, so I can test each new colour mix for tone and opacity before I use it on the main painting.

Small flower test pieces, using a technique similar to folk art where you load your brush with a couple of unmixed colours, and let the brush marks create the colour mix, fun, but not quite the effect I’m after.

Main flower painting, taped to old vinyl cutting board (to protect my wooden drawing board surface from acrylic paint). I’ve created the dark background with a mix of black acrylic paint and dioxazine purple.

Far right – more illustration ideas for countryside scenes, using ink pen with light washes of watercolour on top.