Color Swatches

I have a bag full of color test sheets I can't throw out.
One of the 1st watercolor lessons you learn is to test out your colors on a paper scrap before putting brush to expen$ive watercolor paper.

I get attached to the test color scraps. Sometimes they're better than the so-called 'work of art'. After watercolor class I'd go round picking up the test scraps off the floor. The colors were lush, splashed on freely. Some of my own color test scraps are far superior to anything else IMO. 
  People tear their hair out daily trying to get their walls to look like some swatch of paper with a divine color on it. They've fallen in love with that color and will settle for nothing else = it's madness. Has this happened to you?  

In many PB posts I'll mix up and match paint colors to whatever I'm writing on about, whether it be macarons, chocolate, swimming pools, cherries, toy birds, ice cream, orange, red, black, pink.  

Long ago I took a color mixing class at Parsons. We could only use 3 primaries - RED + YELLOW + BLUE. We mixed colors until we were blue in the face for 6 weeks.

 

Mixing GREENS is always difficult.

That's the thing about color. It's so easy to fall in love with color. I thought I was mad for RED. All those ridiculous personality tests where they ask you your favorite color, I always put RED. But now I realize it's BLUE I can't stop using all over the place.

I took Dr. Lusher's color test for this post.
It told me:
Hungers for intensity in life and welcomes opportunity to take on challanges.

I love color mixing and matching.

It's one of those nice meditative, mindless activities you can do endlessly, yet at the same time is quite challenging. It's not as easy to match a color as you'd imagine.

My Candy (Art) Store

I found this carton à dessin (portfolio) in the Marais and I liked it so much I bought two. The writing/ecriteur is by the artist, BEN. It says, contient peut-être un vrai chef-d'oeuvre/perhaps there's a masterpiece inside.
The jaunes pages in the upper left, I ripped out a few years ago. Don't follow my bad example. The adresses of Parisien art stores (les magasin du beaux-arts) are outdated but still fun to look at. I tend to save old scraps of paper. The watercolor is thé et chocolat painted in Paris.This is my "candy store". It doesn't hurt that it's in Paris. Any art store anywhere is an adventure. Like the shop in Arezzo, it doesn't matter what you buy so long as you buy something. I found the Maison Gattegno by chance(permanently CLOSED), while looking for a nearby branch of Sennelier, which was closed.
It's on 13, rue de la Grande Chaumière is not by chance. Across the street is the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere attended by Modigliani and Calder. Paul Gauguin shared a studio with Alphonse Mucha. You can still walk in and attend a sketch class without registration fees.
A very traditional old art shop - the interior is dark. A flashlight could be helpful, but the owner knows his stock and can find what you can't see. I love the traditional plaster casts in the window. They remind me early days at PA Academy of Fine Arts, when castdrawing was obligatory. I regret not doing my value studies back then. This bulletin board of art class (stage, cours) ads hung by the door of the fermé (closed) Sennelier. Two art stores + an art school all on 1 street + artist's ads. A traveling artist's dream.Art stores fill you with nostalgia. You'll never forget the 1st time you paid for an "Artist" quality tube of paint and felt like a pro. Mel Bochner, a terrific artist, told me that Franz Kline was so crazy for the old,long-gone Torch art shop on 15th street in the village, that he named a painting after it, "Torch".
I'm amazed at this elegant boite d'aquarelle/watercolor box in the vitrine/window. Le prix/price is pretty amazing too. 924 euros. I was so excited to see all these Blockx godets porcelain watercolor pans or paint-filled 'ashtrays' that I saw at Café Deux Magots, my camera shook.  An art store will do that to you.

Moleskine de Voyage #3

Like bubbles in a champagne glass, lovely old things keep surfacing from the closet I'm still cleaning out. Stacks of sketchbooks, old macaron wrappers and now my travel Moleskines. I never leave home without a Mole. It's my religion. It's my addiction. Is there even a choice in the matter?

I love the Moleskines with the graph paper. I'm always hoping/wishing those perpendicular lines will get my truly illegible handwriting/scrawl to straighten up. Man! even I can't read this. It's one thing when you scribble down an idea in the dark, but we're talking full daylight here!

I also love the way the thin graph paper takes watercolor too -- kind of cheesy but it works for me...

Is there a better friend to take with you to a museum ? Moleskines legitimize you while you sketch in front of a Renaissance masterpiece. I did these doodles at the La Nature Morta Italiano exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, 2003.

Someone brought in the catalog. He'd spent the entire summer in Tuscany. I freaked, ran out and got on a plane and got over there PDQ. And it was worth it. The most excessive, robust, rich still life painting you can imagine with Caravaggio as the highpoint.

Does anyone else cover their Moles with stickers? I've got "sticker madness". I can't stand a naked Moleskine. And I have a special passion for those French chocolatiers/pâtisserie stickers they paste down on anything you buy. They are complètement fou (nuts) with stickers too.

There's always an array of sizes and shapes. I wish I knew the French word for sticker. Merci Jennc informed me that the word is "Autocollants"

Malheuresment, these stickers do not have the same shelflife as the Moleskine Notebook. They have a habit of curling up and falling off eventually. I wonder if my affection for these stickers is the same as travelers who pasted stickers all over their trunks and luggage? My Mole is my "trunk" full of travel souvenirs...

Gillot’s Watercolor Medium

Carnet de voyage, I found these while cleaning out my closet. Before there were Moleskine notebooks in my life, I used to paint in travel sketchbooks. Like anything I tackle, I go overboard. I went to The Center For Book Arts on 28 West 27th Street to learn how to make these books myself and I made tons of them.
Google carnet de voyage and you get 38,200 images to pour over. But wait till after you read this post PULEEZE! Maybe I'll become the 38,201 image...qui sait?

I was already making my own watercolor paints so it was a natural. I work part-time at a pigment shop, but it took a while to get down to producing the first pans.
To make paint you need a binder - basically a glue that will make the dry pigment stick to your surface. The then-manager nudged me on, saying, "It's just like making pound cake - a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, a pound of butter etc and mix.."

Making oil paints is pretty straightforward, like pound cake, you add dry pigment (your flour) + Linseed oil (your wet ingredients) and mix. Watercolors are another matter. Most art technique books tell you to just go out to the art store and forgeddaboutit 

After Corot in Italy, watercolor, 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 "

BTW most of my hand-made sketchbooks are filled with Tuscan landscapes - an obsession at that time. I worked really small for years - 4 1/2" x 6 1/2" and smaller. Moving up to 6" x 8 1/2" was a BIG step. I even convinced Travel Roads to give me a 3-week artist residency in Poppi (not far from Arezzo) with these little watercolors.

Owl's Head, Maine, watercolor, 4 1/2 x 6 1/2"

Back to making paint - I took myself off to London to an instructor from the Prince Charles' Drawing School and we spent a morning testing different formulas and making test pans. 5 days later the pans were still wet = NOT GOOD.

At home I played around with glycerine + honey + Ox Gall...yes you can almost eat your paints, BUT DON'T! Ralph Mayer say's in a pinch you can use GUM DROPS if you have no glycerine around. Finally I got it right and began to "cook up" pans and pans of lovely, rich, granular paint and it's been nonstop ever since.

Et voila! 

Eurostar Window Scene, watercolor, 4 1/2 x 6 1/2"

The French (see this IS a French-related post after all) have been way ahead of us in the travel sketchbook arena, publishing piles of facsimile carnet de voyage books. I was going to do a MACARON post today, but I was not happy with my mac watercolor, so it will just have to wait. Hang in there macaron fans !