Looking back at my new years goals, I want to see exactly what I did. I’m looking at my goals.
Make a blogger with art stuff on it
I made a different blog recently, but, I have started this, it’s a wix site. It’s to host some stuff for YouTube.
Start cleaning my computer and phone to prepare for videos
😞 I started, but didn’t finish.
3. Start developing sketches for sketchbook tours
Draw more (this one is literally vague on purpose as it’s more of a vibe and not a particular goal. I want to feel like I draw more) and try to be more on theme with the story or try to start a comic or do some pages of sequential art.
Did and will do
Update this account more often. (And I mean having at least 52 posts)
Doing well.
Find an audience on here.
Oops
Write and finish my Wattpad story. I write updates and not writing and editing.
Look y’all, I’m on my last day for the streak I wanted of ten days. Never doing that again. I hate scrambling for content and stupidly trying to do things on another. I only have two modules to go and I feel like I got punched in the face from somatic issues related to stress.
Unrelated to me!
These swatches are absolutely stunning. I really love Schminke already, they’re just a bit expensive for my taste! If I sold my art, I would totally buy some of these.
I’d hate to put a long list since this list is bigger than Winsor’s, I will discuss the color families I like. (Because otherwise, y’all would be here for hours or skip over boredly.) Some colors have a heart on them if I like them.
Earth yellows
Even though a lot of these were convenience mixtures and don’t show “true color-mixing skill,” they’re awfully beautiful. I really love the ones that offer opacity and brightness. I have no idea how they mix, but I know I’d use them diluted or in mass tone. These particular paints also went down smoothly even though they’re earth colors and granulating.🥺
Earth Reds
The more opaque the color is of this group, the more I love it. I do love when they’re transparent because they have a look I can’t explain, but the opaque ones feel comforting and heavy—like hot, thick soup on a winter day. I just cannot explain why these abstract examples make sense to me, but they do. Earth Reds are comforting, especially that English Venetian Red.🥰🥰🥰
Earth Browns
Earth browns are some of my favorite families in all watercolor brands hands down. There’s so many variations, varieties, textures, strains, hue changes, so on. They’re also typically the cheapest. I would never recommend a palette for someone, but these will be in a palette.
Back when I was younger, other than coloring some skin tones, I avoided browns in my art. I just didn’t really care for it and rather would have vibrant art. Vibrancy is still okay, but browns make vibrant colors vibrant. Brown is about equivalent to black and white.
It is the mixture of tertiary colors, complementary colors, or black and potentially white with hues. It’s great to mix those colors and get “muddy” variations.
Black and Whites
Same thing I said about browns. They add a different look to a painting and I think they’re fun to mix with. ☺️
Yellows and Oranges
I really liked Vanadium Yellow, chromium yellow light, transparent yellow, all the cadmium yellows, and pure yellow of the yellows because they are bright and clean. Some of them are very opaque which is good to me, but I know I can’t mix them with other colors who aren’t or they’ll look thick or ashy (chalky is the word, but chalk reminds me of the filler and ashiness is just what goes on top of something like legs, so I will use that.)
To be honest, like I said on my last swatch dot card that I love oranges? Well, I loved all of them. Especially Saturn Red.🥺 How is a color that beautiful? It borders between orange-red and red-orange and I love that.
I loved all the red-oranges too. If someone told me that I had an unlimited budget to buy what I wanted, I’d buy those first. They’re my soft spot. I did not like red-orange and orange-red when I was younger because I thought they were overrated, but I can totally get why people liked them.
Red and Violet
…eh? They were a bit…mid. Like, don’t get me wrong, I loved the perylenes, the quinacridones (the ones with the actual names), and the madders, but the colors offered in some other brands are cheaper so it’s…really not worth the buy. All of them are beautiful.
Violet and Blue
Manganese violet for the win. That is one truly fantastic color and this one was quite vibrant. My second favorite is ultramarine violet. 😅 I usually love this color in all brands, but I might consider this one because it’s sooo vibrant and actually still has some paint left over so you know it’s one that will last.😉😉
My favorite blues are also very biased…so, I leaned towards more the colors between delft blue and Paris blue. They just had that affect on me. I want to try ultramarine finest. It sounds very promising to have a less granulating ultramarine. Though, I do love granulating ultramarines.
Blue to Green
Usually I love chromium green oxide, but that one made me angry because it had limited paint on the dot card.😡 Anywho, olive green yellowish is something else!😍😍 Normally I hate colors that are convenience mixtures of green because they’re overhyped and I get my hopes up and their mixes upset me, but that one…that one had me stunned. I also liked sap green too. Cobalt green is a color I tried so hard to hate, but I’ve fallen into submission. I love it. (In this brand, idk about others, I’m sensitive).
However, I actually hated permanent green, May green, helio green (usually I like this one too…), and earth green (this brand). May green looking paints are always a terrible color when I mix them. They always look bad.😕 Permanent green isn’t ugly or anything, I’m just a hater and I just want to hate on it, and earth green was ridiculous to rewet.😡 This brand has no fillers really or that much binder to pigment and I’m in a humid climate yet it was ridiculous. 😡And even more ridiculous is that this is a dang convenient mixture and not PG23 makes it even more of a headache. I’ve had trash cheap brands rewet better. Still a beautiful color.
Overall, Schminke has lovely colors and paint and even if I got colors I hated, I’d still enjoy using them. This is just dot cards and not the best representative of the brand.
I told myself I wasn’t going to swatch these and make a video while swatching them out because people like those, but I just didn’t have any patience for myself and just swatched them anyway. I feel so bad…but I really like the colors I’ve swatched!
I just feel like there’s so many swatch videos online with dot cards doing the same route with their videos and I preferred just giving my opinion. I’m going to probably approach it differently because I’m lazy and I do stuff however I want and nobody can tell me what to do (unfortunately).
It’s not here, but I also added tinting information. This information is purely about dispersion then actual tinting. Sometimes with colors, you can tell exactly how they are because they’re so strong, they’ll beat up a color in a dark alley or when they spread, they spread far and that’s typically the higher tinting pigments. The weaker ones hide behind the higher tinting. Higher tinting typically is in colors with smaller particles, but it’s not always the case. Some of them are very weak. Other times, some granulating colors are not weak at all—like Cadmium Red, Orange, and Yellow. They also are very opaque, but opacity has nothing to do with tinting because PB35 is very opaque and it is low tinting.
To the juicy stuff: Which ones do I like so far?
Cadmium Free Red Deep (it’s nice and orange and moves with the water fast!)
Cadmium Red Deep (I’m obsessed with cadmiums!)
Rose Dore (it’s really cute and low tinting appearing. It just gives adorable.)
Quinacridone Red (this brand isn’t the best…but it’s a very beautiful color in masstone)
Permanent Carmine (Rich)
Permanent Rose (I like the way it looks like it has a lot of depth. I have no idea if it’s good at glazing, but it looks like it is because how light touches it, it seems as if it could create its own light source.)
Antwerp Blue (I hate Prussian blues typically because they look gray and icky, but this one is a different look to it that’s much thinner.)
Cerulean Blue Red Shade (I love this color, it is pretty. It’s no reason why I love it. I love it.)
Cerulean Blue (this one has visual depth to it that I really like. It’s probably closer to a sky color.)
Winsor Blue Red Shade (Same reason why I liked Permanent Carmine)
A lot of the blue granulating colors I like, I already have them so I don’t want to talk about them as much and more paints I haven’t experienced.
Indanthrone Blue is so beautiful and is a warmer version of Prussian blue that I like.
Quinacridone Violet…😤😍🥰 all I have to say. I feel strongly about it because it has depth to it but it’s also a very warm purple and I’ve loved warm purples since I was three.
Permanent Mauve is weak and hard to rewet…but oh my is so beautiful.🥰 It reminds me of flowers or something old fashioned and antique. So gorgeous. I really want this one.
Permanent Magenta is beautiful for the same reason Permanent Mauve is. I would one day love to own clothes with that color.
Tbh the whole orange section…I know I can’t buy all those paints, but they make me feel weak in the knees! I love orange! All purples/violets and oranges are good to me.
I feel like this isn’t the best dot card to test the consistency since they give you a little small, thin dot. This doesn’t affect me too much because I know places to retrieve Winsor and Newton that aren’t too overpriced, but if you didn’t have access, this would suck. (And is unfair…)
I feel like it’s a good purchase and all, but they need more paint on the dot cards or lower their price.😤
Y’all! I just got new paints. It’s gouache this time. It is a very opaque watercolor (to an extent). Historically, traditional gouache had white chalk added to it. I would love to show pictures, but you can find them on Google Arts and Culture.
Nowadays, gouache is densely packed pigment and binder with pigments that are more opaque. Typically this binder is gum Arabic and something to help it from molding in a tube. My watercolors I made at home are varieties of opacities, but typically are semi opaque and opaque.
The gouache I received was a Holbein gouache set with a twelve colors. It is majority of the colors in the conventional rainbow but very, very…bright. In fact, they’re too bright for me. Aggressively bright. I normally don’t like bright colors in my art even though I either wear neon colors or heavily saturated shirts. 😂
The thing is, they’re a great investment. I like how they work even though I’m trash at them for right now because it’ll make me have more depth into my style. They’re absolutely delightful after the swatches and the failed painting I will mention later. (it’s not failed, I just don’t like it and have to paint over it with a different medium like acrylic gouache (which is thin, but chunky acrylics that can be easily watered down. Their binder is a polymer instead of gum Arabic. Gum Arabic is rewettable or soluble, but acrylic polymer, once it dries, it’s dry. It is not rewettable. Anyway, this painting still has potential.)
The first twelve colors are Holbein from cool to warm to cool. As well black and white. The rest were done in comparison to see if they were gouache-like enough (I made the last ones)
Holbein has a ton of pigments on here that aren’t very lightfast and some aren’t single pigments either, but it doesn’t mean that they’re bad. They just aren’t single pigments. I refused to thin them down because I’m hardheaded and tried to paint and it looked too rendered and greasy. Personally, I don’t like greasy art. As well, I am not used to this level of opacity! I love opacity, but I was shocked because these were thick, rewet thick, and went down thick and got stuck in my synthetic brushes. I didn’t like that. It made the picture muddy.
Anywho, the upset part was drawing a character that I did with Holbein’s acryla gouache—aka Vivian. I tried painting him, but the palette was very bright and his skin tone and oil-painting skin tone were hard to replicate and add nuance (or I just suck right now and need to approach this differently. )
As well, I struggled badly with drawing him in the first place. I have no idea how I did his design—he’s based off of faces of very popular and renowned artists of the Renaissance—but I think I might have to change it. It something that I hate doing, but what’s the point if he looks vastly different on each picture…I don’t like that.🥲
I’m mad too because they didn’t have an orange…purple, orange, and greens are my soft spots on my palettes and these reds are weak sauce . If they don’t look like blood or dried blood (not an edgy //_. way, but I love dark reds) I struggle with it.
I want a bright orange though. Bright oranges and yellows are great!😋
Overall, I love the flatness of these gouaches and I can wait to make successful art. Anywho, I will be posting pictures of the failed painting when I get back over to that table. 😬 Laugb with me, y’all.
Anywho, I also want to talk about other stuff since I’m here.
I’ve been having bad art days recently because I’ve been pushing myself and also was in interesting health. I’m sorry I haven’t been posting. A lot is going on. I just struggle.
Also, I just wonder if I need to make a change with the way I do things with my art to make it less intimidating and not as mentally exhausting to do. I get scared trying to draw. I struggle with bodies and poses. It’s very hard for me to bodies in general because gender dysphoria and feeling bad makes me jealous of some people’s bodies and other stuff ruin my life.
I also am getting the vibe that my art leans very feminine to y’all and while I’m not going to change that, it does make me wonder about a lot of things about the perception.
It’s like, being in a room and drawing people you understand and leaving that room and people see it differently and while it’s not bad at all, you wonder why and how?
How does someone have a style that is so undeniably feminine? Probably the female gaze. (Not a counter towards the male gaze, the female gaze is mostly nonpolitical 😒and is just about what women—typically heterosexual women want.) Growing up, in a lot of my spaces, unless the person was into anime, they didn’t draw men that often. They’d draw girls. I had male ocs that I liked drawing and enjoyed, but guess what?
They’re all visible to outsiders as women. Undeniably. They don’t look masculine at all. Even when I try, it just isn’t as fun and people have a lot more to say when it’s not manly enough than everyone looking the same.
Anywho, thank you for talking to me. I appreciate it. Stay healthy and hydrated.
What did you bring to the potluck? 