20-minute practice

(about 8x10)
Another subject I like but avoid. This jade plant's on my drawing table. I love the shape of the leaves, but the way you can see leaves behind others and the way the light hits the surfaces of the leaves, some of which are vertical, some horizontal, makes my brain hurt, to quote Monty Python. I started this with the decision that I wouldn't concern myself with trying to retain the whites, where the leaves were lightstruck; I'd just try to get the structure. I started painting on the left (no drawing), where, I think, structurewise, it works; but I ran out of steam or lost my concentration on the right, where the too-straight stem is not pleasing. By the time I got to the pot, I'd totally given up!

(2x3 each)
Then I painted a few ATCs: I thought it'd be nice to include one of these in the package when I return the jobs I'm currently working on ... A little spring surprise for the wonderful people in New York City who keep me busy (and in art supplies ...).

Speaking of art supplies, the three rows below are the colors that are in my little travel palette; the fourth row shows various blues I'm thinking of adding, if I can wedge them in somehow!

Rummaging around over the weekend I found two old folding metal palettes full of half pans. The two rows on top are from a palette I bought after seeing Winslow Homer's metal palette at the Boston Museum of Art (must've been 15 or more years ago!)--I got a palette just like his and filled it with colors myself: so these are the colors I used when I first started painting more--so many blues, so few reds, and no purple. How did I manage?


And the four rows on the bottom are from a set I bought--and augmented with a couple of extra purples and turquoises. But the set, like, it seems to me a lot of sets, comes with too many--or more than I can use--earth colors.

I made these swatches to see if any of the pans were salvageable--I think several are. I'll get rid of a number the earth colors and pans that are too hardened (this may not be an effect of age: some pan colors just never become moist enough to get a brushful of color from them: very irritating!).
Now to take them apart and reassemble them.

Colors in Homer's "two extant moist watercolor boxes": aureolin, cadmium yellow, Indian yellow, chrome orange, vermilion, crimson lake, scarlet lake, Indian purple, Antwerp blue, Prussian green, Hooker's green, green earth, Indian red, burnt sienna, burnt umber, warm sepia, sepia, Van Dyke brown, Payne'sgray, bone black, Chinese white (Susan E. Stricler, ed., American Traditions in Watercolor, p. 65).