A Watercolor Workbook

Lisa Solomon

ROOST BOOKS
BOULDER
2019
Hello, Dear Reader!

I’m so glad you are here. Welcome to the world of color! With this
book, I’m inviting you to break out your paints, get messy, and
work with your watercolors (or other water-based paint of your
choice). In the coming pages you’ll find lot of space, prompts, and
shapes to help you paint directly on the page. The idea is that you
can read and work alongside my examples. But, I wanted to offer
a word of warning. While we have worked to print this book on
the best quality paper we can afford, sadly it is no substitute for
watercolor paper. So, if you do choose to work right in the book,
please know that the pages will cockle, buckle, and warp. The more
water you use, the more likely this is going to happen. (Personally,
I think the book will end up looking really cool with worn, used, and
warped pages, but I don’t want you to be surprised.) If you’d like to
keep your book pristine, I encourage you to practice the exercises
on watercolor paper.

If you’re ready to turn this book into your own creative journal,
let’s go!
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

WHAT IS COLOR?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

PAINTS, BRUSHES, AND OTHER MATERIALS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

EXERCISES COLOR MEDITATIONS

1. Make a Traditional Color Wheel Dots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

with Tints and Shades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Lines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2. Make a Personal Color Wheel Triangles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
with Tints and Shades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Squares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3. Different Color Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Abstract Shapes . . . . . . . . . . . 52
4. Charting Your Paint Box . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Half Circles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
5. Saturation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Rainbows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
6. Make as Many of One Color as You Can Arches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
(and Name Them) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Gingham or Plaid . . . . . . . . . . 78
7. Four Ways to Black . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Washes That Overlap . . . . . . 84
8. Wait, There’s More Than One Kind Inspired By . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
of White Too?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Wet into Wet . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
9. Mixing Complements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Stacked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
10. Favorite Color versus Least Favorite Color . . . . 87 Drips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
11. Starburst Color Matching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Striped . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
12. Organize Something by Color . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Wild Card . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
13. Paint Chip Matching Exercise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
14. Observe and Document Colors ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . 130

in Your World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 RESOURCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

15. Level Up—Inspired by Josef Albers . . . . . . . . . 125 ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . 134
 INTRODUC TION

I ’ve always been fascinated by color. I can spend hours looking through
Pantone books for the absolute “right” baby blue. I love just looking at
lipsticks or markers or paints—soaking in the names of the colors, studying
how they’re all lined up, observing what happens when they’re in a beautiful
order or even out of order. (Would it be sad to admit that I’ve stood in stores
rearranging mangled displays so they look better?) Colors make me feel
and think and change my breathing. When I went to college and decided
I was going to be an art major, I realized that I had some intuitive concepts
of colors and how they worked. But as I painted (poorly) I realized I actually
knew very little about how colors really worked, where they came from, and
how to use them. The result was a lot of wasted paint.
Now as an artist and an art teacher, I’ve spent decades studying color, and
I’ve read countless books on color theory (some of which are listed in the
resources section). I’ve experimented with color in multiple media and in
multiple ways. If you want to understand color, you need to immerse yourself
in color. The way I use color has developed from time spent experimenting
and by making lots and lots of mistakes. This book is the result of distilling
years of my own experimentation with color.
The exercises that follow are meant to offer you a substantial introduction
to color theory through fun and playful experiments. As you work your way
through this book, a willingness to try things that might seem really, really
wrong is key—which means not beating yourself up when things don’t work
out as you want. I try to keep the perspective that if I learned something, then
the failure was completely worth it. I’m not saying this is easy, but try to keep
it in mind as you work through all the exercises.

1
 While the exercises offer directed lessons on color theory, the color
meditations in between each lesson offer a time to pause and play with color.
These “breaks” provide a wonderful counterpoint to the more traditional and
challenging exercises. Over the last couple years, I got interested in meditation
as a practice. I had a hard time finding a comfortable way to enter into it; I
felt bombarded by all the “wellness” talk on “the Internets” and other media.
But I slowly found a way to do it that felt comfortable to me. It involved
regulating my breathing and feeling the breath go in through my nose, down
to my belly, and back out through my nose; doing it when I could, even for
a minute, even in the car when stuck in traffic (don’t close your eyes while
doing this); not feeling the need to sit forever or to allot a designated time;
allowing my mind to wander and learning how to just acknowledge and let
go of the thoughts that swirled in my brain. What I quickly realized was that
I often get the same sensation and sense of well-being when I’m engrossed in
the studio. In general, when I’m feeling stuck or unmotivated, or I don’t have
time to meditate in the “normal” way, I’ve found that doing a little painting
makes all the difference in the world. I feel grounded and centered and ready
to work. All the hustle-bustle and noise go away. I hope it does for you as well.
As I put my color meditations into practice, I found they were also a
perfect warm-up exercise when I’m in the studio. Having some sort of routine
or engagement with a repetitive project helps me grow as an artist. So what
are color meditations? They’re small watercolor paintings where I repeat the
same shape or mark and simply adjust the color. The parameter of keeping
the shape the same allows me to focus on just the color shifts. I try to use
colors that I might not normally gravitate toward. I try to simply see what
happens as I lay down one color next to the others. I try to experiment with
the saturation of the colors, adding more or less water, adding a drop of
another color and seeing how things shift. This practice has brought me
an incredible amount of satisfaction and inspiration. And in all honesty,
it continually teaches me new or surprising things about color.
For each color meditation in this book, make sure you set yourself up for
success. Get out the paint you want to use; if it needs to be on a palette, put
it in the order you’d like; get your water cups, paper towels, brushes, and so
2 on at the ready and within reach. Perhaps you want an extra sheet of paper
to use as a test sheet to try out colors, washes, brushstrokes, or saturations.
If you are going to mix a lot of colors a nice clean palette helps. If you are
new to painting, then try out different setups each time you do an exercise.
Try placing your paint on the left or right or above your paper and try the
same with your water. You’ll soon develop a pattern or habit of setup that
works best for you. Obviously I’m giving you some space in this book to
create a color meditation for each prompt, but feel free to do more than
one, and mix it up to learn more about different kinds of paper you own.
You can use the same paints, just change the order, or not. Explore a huge
range of color, or a narrow palette. Remember, there’s no right or wrong here.
Your meditation doesn’t need to look like mine. In fact, I hope it doesn’t.
That said, if you feel too intimidated and really like mine, then by all means
copy it. (Remember—say it with me—no right or wrong here. Make it your
mantra.) Try to keep your feet planted. Try to not think of anything else but
the mark and the colors you’re choosing. Breathe in and out as you make
your mark. Let your intuition run the show. Please—have fun!
My hope is that by trying the exercises and engaging with the meditations,
you’ll deepen your love and understanding of color—in whatever medium
you choose to work in.

3
 WHAT IS COLOR?

T o understand color, it’s helpful to have a sense of how we perceive color.

In essence, color is all in our minds. It’s highly personal and variable,
influenced by the time of day, the type of light (artificial versus sun, direct
versus indirect), the surrounding colors—you get the picture.
For example, imagine there’s a green apple on the table. Why do we see it as
green? There’s light in the room. The light bounces back to our eyes. The green
isn’t in the apple. The apple is absorbing all the color wavelengths that our eyes
can see and is reflecting green back to us. A white object is reflecting all the
color waves back to us, and a black one is absorbing all the color waves.
When you really start to think about color, it becomes clear how very rela-
tional it is. If I say “red” to a room full of people, I can almost guarantee that
everyone has a different red in their head. If I say “Coca-Cola red,” and you’ve
seen a Coke can, the red in our heads might be closer to matching. Color isn’t
only influenced by the time of day and the type of light, but also by the way
our eyes and brains work and the culture we live in. We all perceive color
differently, and we all have different cultural associations with color. For
example, in China women wear red to weddings and white to funerals; in
the United States it’s white to weddings and black to funerals. And who
decided that using pink for girls and blue for boys was a good idea? And
how has culture pushed back against those gendered color ideas of late?
Colors can also bring out visceral reactions. Have you ever divided a room
by who likes the color purple? Do it. It’s pretty fun. Then subdivide—what
kind of purple? Royal, lavender, magenta-tinged, blue-tinged . . . For whatever
reason, purple tends to elicit some very strong reactions.
It’s also interesting to explore the different ways we process color physically.
Take the fascinating concept of afterimage, for example. In a nutshell, if you
stare at an image of a bright red square in a bright green background for
twenty to thirty seconds without blinking and then immediately look at a 5
 white wall or piece of paper, you’ll see the opposite—a green square in a red
background. There’s also simultaneous contrast—how two different colors
affect one another. We’ll touch on this a bit in exercise 15 (page 125), but it’s
also something you could delve into deeper on your own. Similarly, optical
mixing is another way we process color. Optical mixing explores how our
eyes blend small areas or similar colors together to form a bigger picture or
interpretation. (Impressionist paintings and mosaics are great examples of this.)
Welcome to the beautiful rabbit hole of color! I hope you find that having
even a small sense of how we understand and talk about color is helpful as we
move on to our color explorations.

TERMS
.................................................................................................................

Let’s go over some general terms that are part of the lexicon of color theory. (If
you already know these, skip ahead.) Many of these will be developed further in
upcoming exercises, so this is simply a quick rundown to familiarize yourself.
Hue. This is the name of the color itself—e.g., red, orange, blue.
Additive Color. This one used to confuse me to no end. This is when you’re
looking at the behavior of light mixtures. It helped me immensely to think
about three light bulbs: a red, a green, and a blue one. If you overlap these
you’ll get familiar colors such as yellow (green + red) and purple (blue + red),
but all three of them together will give you a white. It also helps me to think
about these in terms of technology. Your TV and computer screens are RGB
(red, green, blue) environments.
Subtractive Color. This is when you are looking at physical colors—paints,
for example—and how they interact. This is basically what we’re doing here in
this book. You can also relate it to the printing process, which uses C (cyan),
M (magenta), Y (yellow), K (black; it’s K because we use B for blue in RGB).
When you mix cyan with yellow you get green. Supposedly if you mix
CMY you get K. (Try it. You’ll see it’s not usually what you think of as black.)
Here’s the tricky thing: your computer screen is RGB, but it’s simulating a
subtractive environment. Still with me? I know it’s counterintuitive to think
that subtractive = painting, but it is what it is. Paints (and most art supplies)
6 use pigments or colorants that determine the colors we see.
 Warm Colors. These are generally thought of as what you see in daylight
(or sunrise/sunsets). You’ve got your reds, yellows, oranges, and browns.
Cool Colors. These are generally nighttime colors—your blues, greens,
grays. But here’s the thing: every hue (white, black, red, etc.) can lean one way
or the other. We often talk about a cool white (more blue) versus a warm one
(more yellow), and this is true of any hue we can see and create. Warm and
cool are helpful descriptors.
Lightness/Darkness or Tints/Shades. This is how light or dark a hue is;
it relates to how much white or black has been added to each hue. This isn’t
saturation, which is the relative intensity of a color. I like to think of saturation
as how much you can see through a color—think opacity on your computer
screen, from 100 percent (full strength of the color) to 10 percent.
Value. This is another way to talk about the relative lightness or darkness
of the hue. If you think in terms of black and white, black is at one end of
your spectrum, white is at the other, and there are all the values of gray in
between. Things can be different hues and be the same value—for example
a very dark red is similar in value to a very dark gray. Value can be used to
harmonize or create big contrasts. One way to help check the values of hues
is to use a program such as Photoshop to turn your image black and white. In
doing so you can determine if what you’ve made has a good range of value or
if the overall values you used are similar. You can also squint—things that are
relative in lightness and darkness will consolidate as you do so.

There will be more terms that pop up as we work through the exercises in
the book.

COLOR SYSTEMS
.................................................................................................................

To make more sense of color, there are, in general, different identified gamuts
(ranges or scopes) or color systems. As you begin to study color, it’s good to
have some familiarity with these. Here are a few of the systems that are most
frequently used.
RGB (Red, Green, Blue). This additive color spectrum combines those
three colors of light on a spectrum of 255 to create the colors we see (the most 7
 familiar application of this is on your computer or TV screen). In RGB, black
is R-0, G-0, B-0 and white is R-255, G-255, B-255.
CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). This is the spectrum used for
physical printing. It’s a smaller gamut, aka has fewer colors in it, than RGB—if
you’ve ever printed something from the computer and it looked one way on
screen and another way printed, this is why. There are websites and Pantone
books that offer formulas to convert colors you see on-screen into CMYK
so that you won’t be surprised. In CMYK, black is C-0, M-0, Y-0, K-100 and
a standard green is C-100, M-0, Y-100, K-0. If you wanted your green to be
darker you could add K or some M.
HEX Colors. These are often referred to as web colors, although these days
there are places that use them to print (such as onto fabric). They’re made up
of three sets of two numbers or letters starting from 00 and ending with FF.
Black is #000000, a standard red is #FF0000, white is #FFFFFF.
PMS/Pantone Matching System. This is a commercial color system that has
slowly but surely become world famous. Each year Pantone releases a color of
the year and a color trend forecast. If you want to be sure that something in
print will be a specific color, then Pantone is the way to go. They sell specific
ink colors (for digital printing, silk-screening, letterpress, etc.), and these days
they also have an app, several books, colored pencils, and a gazillion other
things with their brand.

Our eyes see millions of colors but understanding and utilizing color systems
will allow you and someone else to agree on what color you’re using or
talking about.

8
 PAINTS, BRUSHES,
AND OTHER MATERIALS

T his book is designed for you to work on these pages alongside my

prompts. There are some basic materials that you’ll need (unless you
can magically make art appear by waving your hand). If you’re already an
artist/maker, you may be well stocked and ready to go. If you’ve got some
paints and brushes that you like and know how to use, paper towels and
cups for water, you can just go ahead and skip to the first exercise. But if
you’re brand-spanking-new to painting (to be honest, I’m a bit jealous if you
are because—how fun!), or if you want an overview of recommended items,
here’s what I think you need to get the most out of this book.

PA I N T
.................................................................................................................

For the projects in this book, I recommend using watercolor or gouache in

either a tube or pans. (And you can mix these together—both the tube/pan
and watercolor/gouache. It’s like one big happy family.) For the record, both
these paints use the same pigments and binder (gum arabic). There are either 9
 more/bigger pigment flakes used in gouache
and/or they add a chalk to it that ultimately
makes it more opaque—that’s really the major
difference between the two.
You could certainly use bottled inks or acrylic
paints of any kind if that’s what you have. I really
recommend water-based media because it’s so
much easier to clean up and easier to control in
terms of saturation—you just add more water to
make them more transparent. And it won’t ruin
your paper. Oil-based media will seep, leaving a stain on your paper and even-
tually could eat through the page leaving a hole. With acrylic paint you really
need to use mediums to get them to work correctly, and they dry out if you
leave them on a palette. You can also leave tube watercolors/gouaches out and
rewet to reuse! (Bonus!)
I recommend getting the biggest set of
watercolors/gouache you can afford, but you can
easily do almost all the exercises with a bare-bones
set of red, blue, yellow, white, black, and brown.
(I say “almost” because the color-matching exercises
will be harder with a
very small set.) Some
things to keep in mind:
different types of blues and reds will
give you very different kinds of purples; some colors
lean warm, some lean cool, and these will affect
how your colors mix.
First I’ll explain what I use, and then I’ll offer a
couple of alternatives.
I use a set of thirty-six Kuretake watercolor pans.
They use Japanese characters for their color names,
but they also use numbers. They also offer sets in
different sizes; their twelve-color set would be a
10 lovely way to start.
 I also have a set of twenty-four Winsor & Newton pans, which includes:

lemon yellow green

yellow sap green
scarlet lake viridian
red olive green
alizarin crimson yellow ochre
permanent rose raw sienna
French ultramarine Indian red
cobalt burnt sienna
cerulean blue burnt umber
blue raw umber
violet ivory black
Payne’s gray titanium white

I’ve augmented this set with:

green gold opera rose

quinacridone gold Chinese white
turquoise light indigo
cadmium yellow

I keep additional tubes of lamp black, Mars black, and zinc white.
I also really love my incredibly inexpensive thirty-six pan set of Artist’s
Loft watercolors (no names of colors anywhere, and not the most pigmented,
but still lovely).
Finally, I have a set of random gouaches that I often mix and use with
my watercolors to make them less transparent or shift their hue.

11
 If you’re starting from scratch and want to build your own set, these
are the basic twelve colors to begin with. Because brands sometimes name
colors differently, please note I sometimes list several options/names for
each hue (you don’t need to get four kinds of warm yellow—just one):

titanium white
ivory black
yellow— Hansa yellow, Winsor yellow, azo
warm yellow— quinacridone gold, Hansa yellow deep, Indian yellow,
chrome yellow deep
scarlet— pyrrol scarlet, Winsor red, vermillion
crimson— alizarin crimson, carmine, quinacridone crimson (this is a type
of synthetic pigment, and it comes in different colorways, which is why
there’s a gold and a crimson and other quinacridone colors as well.)
rose— permanent rose, quinacridone rose
ultramarine blue— this is pretty much the same name across all brands;
sometimes it’s called French ultramarine
cerulean— same; it’s pretty much the same across brands
phthalo blue (green shade)— Winsor blue, Prussian blue
phthalo green (blue shade)— Windsor green
yellow ochre— goethite, transparent yellow oxide
burnt sienna or burnt orange— same across all brands
raw or burnt umber— same across all brands; Indian red is a good substitute

I really recommend sticking with one set of paint—large or small—throughout

all these exercises. You’ll definitely learn more this way. You can always do the
exercises again in another media or with another set of colors at any point in
time, but I promise you’ll get the most bang for your buck if you approach
these projects with the same color set.
If you’ve never worked with water-based media, spend a little bit of time
just fooling around on a scrap of heavyweight watercolor paper (if you use
printer paper you will not be happy). There are all kinds out there—there’s a
bit more about paper in the next section. Try using the least amount of water
12 you can with the paint, then add a lot more water and see what happens.
Blot your brush and see what happens. Wet the paper first and put your brush
into that wet spot and see what happens (this is a wet-on-wet application). How
long of a stroke can you make before your brush stops making a mark? Just get
a feel for how the paint works and moves.
If you really want to geek out about colors, here’s a tip: Each tube or pan
should be labeled with a pigment number. (It’s tiny, and on the back; on
some pans it’s on the packaging. FYI many inexpensive brands DO NOT list
pigments.) For example, quinacridone rose is PV19. Any tube of paint that
uses that pigment will list PV19. Some brands mix pigments and then label
them with names, some of which might seem familiar. For example, phthalo
turquoise might have phthalo blue’s pigment, PB15, in addition to others.
It won’t look or act the same as straight phthalo blue. The great thing about
looking at pigment colors is that these codes can help guide you across all
brands. If you know you like Indian yellow with NY20 in it, any brand with
that pigment should be consistent in color. Also, if you’re mixing colors,
note that the more pigments involved, the more chance your colors will
get muddy. This is because you think you’re mixing two colors, but if there
are actually four pigments in one tube and three in another you’re actually
mixing seven colors!

PA P E R
.................................................................................................................

Let’s chat about paper for a second, shall we? Although this book provides you
space to try all these exercises out right here, I’m hoping that you’ll like them
so much you’ll want to do them again. After all, repetition is really what leads
to breakthroughs and mastery of craft (in my opinion, anyway). Plus, I’m really
hoping that the color meditations will take over your life and you’ll end up
with stacks and stacks of them—and if that’s the case, you’ll need a lot of paper!
With wet media it’s really important to use the right kind of paper. Have
you ever tried to paint with watercolors on laser printer paper? It usually
leads to a buckling, pilled, potentially holey mess. Even regular sketchbook
paper won’t hold up to pass after pass of gouache.
There are two traditional types of paper: hot press and cold press. Hot
press is smooth and allows for more details, but the surface can buckle if 13
 you keep layering your paint. Cold press is bumpy and textural—allowing
water to soak into it, but cold press can be a bit unpredictable because
there are literally divots and thus the paint might not travel in a straight
line. These days there are also synthetic papers (such as Yupo or Dura-Lar)
that are more like vellums but accept wet media. They offer a completely
different look and feel and they’re semiopaque (which I love). Traditional
rice or mulberry papers are an option as well; they’re surprisingly durable
for how fragile they seem. Paint tends to spread on them, though, so keep
that in mind. (This means your tiny dot might become a medium dot on
its own.) There are now also a whole host of mixed-media papers that work
fairly well with wet media. When in doubt, read the package; it usually says
what the intended media is.
Papers come in different weights: 90 lb. (190 gsm), 140 lb. (300 gsm),
260 lb. (356 gsm), 300 lb. (636 gsm)—more weight equals thicker paper.
Many think that papers under 260 lb. should be stretched to keep them
flat. (This is a process where you wet and tape the paper down so it lies flat
and doesn’t buckle as you work. You can google how to do this if it interests
you.) Papers also vary by manufacturer and price—try different kinds to
see what you like. Paper comes in single sheets, in packs, or on blocks—in
so many sizes—with and without deckled (torn-looking/textured) edges.
A lot of people like blocks because they offer stability (no need to stretch the
paper). I tend to have a variety in my stash: a less expensive pad to try out
washes and ideas, and more expensive paper for when I’m really getting into
something. People can get very, very picky and personal about what they use
and why, but if you don’t have a preference, you’re in the beautiful position
of finding what works best for you! Note that you’ll get the best results if
you work on watercolor paper, but the paper in the book will get you started.
(Keep in mind, however, that these pages will warp.)

14
BRUSHES
.................................................................................................................

Oh, there are so many brushes!

Real hair brushes, like sable, are the best for
watercolor/gouache, but these days synthetics are
catching up, and they actually work better for acrylics.
I also love Asian bamboo and sumi brushes
because they work really well, they can create very
fine lines and also fill big shapes, and they’re rela-
tively inexpensive.
Here’s a quick rundown of types of brushes that
will work well for the exercises here (and what I
used in preparing the samples). Brushes come in
tiny sizes, from 000 to very, very big 50+, and are
also sometimes marked by inches, such as ⅜ inch to
2 inches. Use brushes you like the feel of and screw
the rules and conventions, I always say.
This book is small, so I would stick with brushes that you can fit into the
shapes on the pages. If you don’t have any brushes, then a good variety pack
will give you a range of sizes and styles to experiment with.
Round. These come to a point. They’re really good for fine lines,
small spaces, and details. They also can provide long, even line-like strokes.
Sizes 0–4 would be good for this book.
Flat. These have medium to long hairs that end in a square, blunt edge.
They come in different widths. They’re good for maneuverability, the wider
ones for creating washes; if you turn them on their sides the edge can do
some line work too. I think any size of flats would be useful, but I used 0–6.
Angular/Angled. This is my current favorite go-to brush shape. The small
point is really great for detailing and getting into corners, and you can use
it like a flat, too, to fill spaces. It’s super versatile. For some reason, angled
brushes often list an inch width, not just a size. A 6, 8, or 12 would work well,
aka ¼ inch, ⅜ inch, ½ inch.
Traditional Bamboo/Calligraphy. These are usually goat hair (which definitely
feels/works differently than sable)—their long point allows for strokes that
15
 vary from wide to fine in one motion (not every brush can do this). Any size
from 1 to 6 would be useful in this book. They’re also wonderful if you want
to practice hand lettering.
Mop/Oval Wash. Mops usually have a point; ovals don’t. Both are great for
laying down big washes or swaths of color. They’re not very practical for this
book except for maybe color meditations, but . . .
Hake/Mottlers/Squares. These are usually bigger than the other brushes
described above. Hake is a traditional Asian brush often used to prewet paper
or lay down a first wash. Mottlers usually have short handles but work in the
same way. Squares are just larger versions of flats that are shaped more like a
square than a rectangle.

PA P E R T O W E L S / B L O T C L O T H
.................................................................................................................

If you’re using watercolor/gouache, you’ll need paper towels or a nice and

sturdy cotton cloth to blot your brushes with. I like to use old baby burp
cloths or cut pieces of t-shirts (higher end, not too thin). I tend to gravitate
toward white cloths so I can see where clean areas are. Clean areas are useful
for freshly blotting pools of paint or cleaning up a color on your palette.
Watercolor and gouache are fairly washable, so I tend to throw them in laundry
now and again too. Try to avoid using something that will shed lint onto your
brush. The lint will transfer to your paper and make smooth washes impossible.

PA L E T T E
.................................................................................................................

My all-time favorite palette is the enamel-coated one. It’s white with a lip
so the water doesn’t run off the end. If you’re using paints out of a tube you
can line them up along the sides and use the inside area for mixing. There
are also some great plastic or ceramic white palettes of all shapes and sizes.
Many sets of watercolors in pans provide a white palette area to mix. I suggest
using a white or neutral gray palette so you can really see your colors, but you
could always use a dinner plate or piece of glass (tape the edges, please!)
just as easily. Keep in mind that something with a lip or edge will most likely
16 work best because you’re using water . . . it has a tendency to run a bit wild.
 white plastic enamel ceramic
If you choose to use acrylic paints, you might need a few more supplies.
You’ll need a palette knife, because mixing paints with your brushes is
the fastest way to ruin them. You’ll also need some mediums. Do not try to
paint acrylics with just water. I promise you will be frustrated. Immediately.
You’ll need some matte or gloss medium to put in your paint. I also really
recommend a flow aid (this is something you drop into your water for acrylic),
and then a glazing or pouring medium to thin out your paint so it can be
transparent. There’s a lot of info online about acrylic painting (I teach a class
on Creativebug about it), and I suggest you watch or read a few things, and
play around to get comfortable before you attempt the exercises in this book.

A NOTE ON COST
..............................................................................................................

Before we dive in, I want to take a minute to say, with regard to materials, you
get what you pay for! This is just a truth in art supplies. In paint, the more
expensive paints contain better pigments and more of them. Cheaper brands
use chalk and other fillers. With brushes, the natural hair brushes will hold
water beautifully and keep their points for years and years to come if you
take care of them. Cheaper brushes will fall apart or not hold their shapes.
Expensive paper will take abuse—you can apply layers of washes and it won’t
buckle or tear. Cheap paper will tear, buckle, or fall apart. That said, I’m not
really a materials snob. I love my cheap five-dollar watercolor palette as much
as my eleven-dollar tube of paint. They just perform differently, and I don’t
expect them to do the same things. Same with my brushes. I have synthetics
that I travel with, or stuff into bags, or use for practice, or tests, or to create tex-
tures (I don’t want to push down hard with my fifty-dollar brush). But I adore
my real sables because they do things that the cheap brushes don’t. Please just
keep that in mind. Cost shouldn’t really be a barrier, and you can definitely
make gorgeous things with inexpensive supplies, but I want you to know there
is a difference (and you’ll learn this quickly if you do your own comparisons). 17
 Color Meditation DOT S

Let’s warm up with our very first color meditation!

My first-ever color meditation was dots. I was thinking about garlands,
so I painted dots, shifting the color saturation for each one along a swooping
line. Each color got three dots: full strength, half strength, quarter strength
(aka saturation shift).
So let’s start with dots. You can do them in garlands, in rows, randomly
all over the page. They can overlap or not touch; they can be big, small,
all the same size, increase or decrease in size. They can be made with a big
brush, a small brush, a stick, a dropper. Just make some dots.

20
Paint some dots

21
 Yellow Yel
en
- Gre low
-ora
low nge
Yel Tint
n

Ora
Hue
Gree

nge
Shade

Red - orange
Blue - Green

Red
e
Blu

Red
urple Pur -
-P e ple
Blu
Purple