23. New Skills
An unexpected JOY of doing Morning Posters (my visual, neurodiversity-friendly version of Morning Pages from The Artists Way) has been discovering new skills with mixing watercolour paints. I’m finding new ways into celebrating and exploring the pigments in my palette and that the text in The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair really comes alive when you engage with the pigments described in a physical way.
Current obsession: New Gamboge – a synthetic version of a pigment once collected from the resin of Garcinia trees, principally grown for the purpose in Cambodia.
When touched with a drop of water, these toffee-brown blocks yielded a yellow paint so bright and luminous it almost seemed fluorescent.
– Kassia St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour
For Morning Posters, I get up and, without overthinking it, mix and daub colours on the page. As with Morning Pages where you are supposed to just let your words spill out, I just go for it with the colours and place them wherever I like. When the paint is dry, I take my brush pens or rubber stamps or whatever else I want to use and do a combination of writing and stamping and drawing on the page. The watercolour base acts as a kind of grid or framework.
This turns out to be the best approach for me to learn about colour mixing because the stakes are so low. I’m not planning to show these to anybody. They are not burdened with having to be ART. I don’t have to be clever and good on these pages – they’re just for me. It turns out that some kind of performance anxiety had been in the way of me really exploring my watercolours. With that out of the way, I’m getting the hang of mixing colours now, in the curious, permissive space of Morning Posters.
Thanks to my palette of primaries and Kassia St Clair, I’ve learnt how to make Hooker’s Green (Prussian Blue and New Gamboge) and am slowly learning how to use multiple jars of water and rags to not muddy the paints.
As I discuss in my online course, Colour at Play, understanding how to mix colours is an invaluable transferable skill; it helps us more deeply understand how colours work. In that course I use coloured pencils for colour mixing – it’s so nice to learn how to do the same thing with a new medium.
What new skills are you learning?
#knitsonikbacktoschool
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Felix, I love this idea. Will play with it. I’m still having fun with your Bullet Journaling course. Into Part 5. I’m a bit slow with the course itself but faithful to my journal. Once I finish the journal course I’ll be right on to your Colour at Play course which I also purchased earlier in the year.
Having fun with, and being faithful to your journal are all that matters! The only pace that’s good for doing the course is the one that works for you :)
So happy that you’ll go straight from KNITSONIK Bullet Journaling to Colour at Play, and I hope it opens up for you – as it did for me – new ways of indexing and exploring colour experiences in a journal.
Had a few weeks of kilter (covid) but back to reading your posts and collecting ideas. October is my month to explore colors in fabric, yarn, and paint.
Sorry to hear about Covid and welcome to a beautiful, creative October!