I love pastels to add different texture and dimension to my work. These are oil pastels by Sennelier, and my favorite colors (today, at least!) are the emerald green and turquoise blue (fifth and seventh from the top.) Of course, the iridescent colors are fun, too. I usually just put color wherever I’m inspired to, but the color wheel comes in handy sometimes, as well.
Getting ready to pack up my Found Leather Goods art portfolio
and hit the road again! This time, I’m heading just a few hours south,
to Austin where I lived for many years and love from the bottom of my
heart.
Because
it’s a short weekend trip, and because it’s home to one of my favorite
art stores and I know I will make a stop for more art supplies, I’m
packing my artist travel bag pretty light. Just my charcoal sketching pencils, a few different water-soluble pencils in summer colors, and a sparkly blue gel ink pen for capturing that beautiful Central Texas sky. A glitter brush pen can capture shine without the potential mess of an ink jar.
Custom Paint Palette: Shades of Santa Fe
I
recently began making my own paint with gouache binder medium and pigment
powders. It’s very rewarding to see the medium and powder combine into
the final result, and to be able to personalize the color exactly how I want for any given project.
The
ability to make my own custom paint palette inspired me to create
specific colors for the places I visit. The mixing supplies are too
cumbersome to take on the road with me, so I pack lightweight tools in
my artist travel kit, then rely on memory and the sketches I make on the go to recreate the colors once I am back in my studio.
Our recent road trip through West Texas and New Mexico focused mainly on Santa Fe with a day trip up to Taos and the Rio Grande Gorge. The landscape changed constantly, from the plains and desert conditions of the Texas Panhandle into Santa Fe, to the mountains, evergreen and birch trees as we headed north toward Taos. Just a few miles from Taos, at the gorge, it was flat again. Coming from Dallas where you’ll drive a similar distance and see mostly concrete, this diverse scenery was a special treat to experience.
This inspired me to create the colors shown above: Rio Grande Russet, Adobe Peach, La Posada Plum, Evergreen, Desert Sky, Horizon Blue and Sparkling Shadow. These colors are made from Earth Pigments and Pearl-Ex, combined with gouache medium. For the painting below, I embellished with gold drawing ink and used an off-the-shelf warm gray watercolor for the background.
Part of the fun of traveling is putting together my artist travel
kit. It differs slightly for each destination, depending on space,
weather and the trip’s planned activities.
For this
particular adventure, we are driving Southwest, so I made sure to have
many desert-inspired colors to choose from, plus some metallics to
accent. I didn’t want to include pastels or anything that might easily
melt. Watercolor-infused paper and water-soluble pencils keep things
versatile and compact.
Even though we will have room in the
car, I travel pretty light. I keep my art supplies simple while I’m on
the trip and make quick sketches or color studies to draw more involved
pieces from when I’m back home. This allows me to balance making art
with the fun of immersing myself in a new city. I also make a point to
visit art supply stores when we travel (independent art supply stores if
possible!) so if there’s something I forget or feel I must have, I have
the option of purchasing it on the trip, patronizing a local business,
and having an artsy souvenir.
Here are the basics of my next artist travel kit: (Left to Right) Strathmore 5X7 Visual Journal; Peerless Watercolor Booklet; Pentel Aquash water brush pen; 3B and 6B Staedtler Mars Lumograph charcoal pencils; HB Koh-I-Noor Toison; Silver and Gold Caran D’ache Supracolor II pencils. I pack my supplies in a Found Leather Goods portfolio bag.
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