I have a dream of painting pictures with horses in pretty much every one of them, so I do a little praticing now and then. Maybe I’ll get there someday, but first I need to gain confidence drawing them. These head sketches are from my favorite children’s illustrator Sam Savitt. His book is Draw Horses with Sam Savitt. It’s awesome. I added some dull colors here and there as an afterthought when I realized I had used up an entire page of watercolor paper with pencil sketches.

I’m still getting used to my Daniel Smith watercolors. They’re so vibrant, and I only have the six colors, so I’m practicing using the pigments straight…

…and with mixing. These stormy sketches are from Bob Davies’ tutorials. I gained some confidence mixing gray and burnt umber, plus the skies are really fun, super moody, which is what I’m fancying at the moment.

I’ve been practicing horses, and here are a couple attempts as well as a few other practice sketches:

I used a page in my journal to practice building backgrounds with different types of layers and then lifting the color back up with a damp brush. My favorite is the little running horse on the bottom left. The most difficult was the landscape on the bottom right. I stopped trying with that one. Lifting color is super fun. I’ll be doing more of this.

Along with steadily filling up the pages of my sketchbooks, my student-grade Cotman watercolor set has been fast disappearing. My original original set had ten 8ml tubes and I added three. So far I’ve emptied five. Several tubes haven’t appealed to me yet, like white and black. I’ve been using yellow ochre and burnt umber, but I’m never happy with the results, probably because they’re opaque. Opaque muddies the waters, so to speak.

So, with the thought that I needed more paint, and I was leaning toward transparent colors, and I wasn’t using five of the original ten colors, I realized I was in a perfect situation to experiment with artist-quality paints and consider some new colors. So, I purchased Daniel Smith’s Essentials set.

This teeny set (each tube is 5 ml) has six transparent colors in a split primary palette: two each of red, yellow, and blue. Each of these colors is either warm or cool, which means that instead of “yellow,” there’s a yellow with a hint of green and a yellow with a hint of orange. This makes one cooler and one warmer. It’s a curious thing that with these six colors, so many combinations can be made.

As it turns out (with the exception of purple), mixing cools with cools and warms with warms gives a crisper, more vibrant color. Crossing the warm with a cool gives a duller color. Mixing three together gives a neutral brown or green/gray. And when I bravely mixed all six? A steely gray. After having a little fun painting a glazing grid (top left) and doing some initial mixing of greens and warms with warms and cools with cools, I found this wonderful handout from the Daniel Smith company on this exact set. I set up a color wheel and gave their mixing a try. Someday I’ll write about the paint as far as painting a sketch and not dabbling with color wheels and charts.

I also purchased this Mijello Bulletproof Glass Palette–which isn’t glass nor bulletproof. It’s some type of plastic. I like my other Mijello Fusion Palette a lot–a super lot! Strangely, however, even with using a limited palette, I mix like crazy and wanted a bigger mixing area. Right now, I only have my Daniel Smith colors in it.

Here are the two, side by side: