Starting from the Beginning: Art

          I've been away from my art supplies and drawing for a long time mostly because I have Psoriartic Arthritis, which cased a deformity in my dominant hand. I can hold the pencil or brush but not for a long time and not in the way that I used to hold them before so now I'm relearning everything while working with that deformed hand. Doctors orders, because using the hand helps with physical therapy.  

          So now I am working my way slooooowly through a class in Udemy.com called How to Draw and Sketch for Absolute Beginners with an amazing instructor. Once I finish this class I'm going to do a perspective class and an anatomy class with the same instructor because I like his style. He starts slowly and builds on what you have already learned in the previous class but you must be willing to put in the work.

          Also on the watercolors front I realized that even with tracing elements from different reference pictures my "coloring" skills were pretty 2 dimensional and colors are not as great as I would like them to be.

Traceable from Art Sherpa on YouTube.

So now I am working my way through a book on called "Exploring Color Workshop". It starts from the basics of how to mix the primary colors to get secondary and tertiary colors. This is what I am looking for right now. To just have fun while I learn. 

This is my set up. Paper from SAA which I use for practice because it is cheap and at the same time one sheet can be cut into 2-4 depending on how big you want your work to be. A porcelain palette, which was actually a plate for samples. I have two of them and use either one or two depending on how many colors I am using or need to mix. I usually use Windsor & Cotman paints but I decided to go simple and use the Daniel Smith Starter pack which has 3 cool primary colors and 3 warm primary colors. Two cups of water, one to clean the brush and one for dipping or for adding water to mix the paints, a pipette to get water and a round brush.

I did the exercise in the book with both the warm primaries and the cool primaries and I loved playing with the paints. Here are the results.

The exercise in the book.

I did the cool colors first and then the warm colors. I found the warm colors harder to mix and keep getting muddy but I wasn’t really sure if that was from the paints or the water was too dirty by the end and that made my mixes muddy. I’ll probably redo these again before moving to the next exercise.