February 26, 2019 – The Junebug Blog

Hi!

I am SO happy it paused raining today! I went outside and sat, just watercoloring, for a few hours, soaking in all the sun! I’m so glad God gave us a hint of Spring today; I would’ve gone crazy without it! (He probably new that😁)

Also: Thank you guys so much for 60 followers! Thank you so much for reading my little blog here. It has been a fun journey(:

MOVING ON…

I have acquired a few different versions of watercolors over the past little while, and I wanted to test them all out, and I thought y’all might like to see!

I have these small pieces of paper cut out for swatching, which is almost my favorite part. It’s so fun to see all the colors on the page.

I decided to start with my tube paints first, so that I could give them ample amount of time to dry. The brand of these paints are the Royal Langnickel Essentials. I really like these paints and how saturated they are compared to some of the others. They can also be layered well, which I’m a big fan of. I think you can get these paints on Amazon

I put them all out on my palette I got HERE and then went to get some water.

I love how bright the colors are, especially the violet! I love the color Prussian blue, too.

Next I did some swatches with this super old Crayola watercolor palette we had. I knew these wouldn’t be very good quality or colors, but they were watercolor…😒 The blue turned out well!

Heh. Yeah, that’s all I had to say about them(:

Then I used this old (even older than the last one) watercolor set. This was the one I loved to use before I got my Windsor and Newton palette last year. This is a Prang Oval-8 palette. This is a great palette for beginners, and it’s very affordable😊

This is my Winsor & Newton compact watercolor set, which is my favorite. (They also come in bunches of different formats, not just compact😁)

These are all of the swatches on this page. I’m actually happy I did this because I had no comparison swatches. (All of them together)

Then I started swatching all the watercolor pencils. The brand of watercolor pencils we have are the Conté a paris aquarelle pencils. I found this set at a yard sale in the fall and I hadn’t really used them until recently. I would totally recommend these are the Winsor and Newton ones to anyone(:

So How these work is: You sketch the color with the plain pencil down THEN add water. (It took me forever to figure this out!) I have heard of people putting water ON the pencil, but I have found that that doesn’t quite give the same effect.

I wanted to see if they blended well together, so I swatched them all beside each other.

Then I added water. I think they do blend well! I like how this turned out. I shall be using this technique in the future. (Also: do y’all have any tips for watercolor pencils? I’m all ears!)

Oh, while I’m on it, I am using the Marvy Watercolor brush pen. I love this one. It’s the perfect thing for traveling, mainly because it’s (pretty well) self-cleaning, and it holds it’s own water. I also have used the Pentel version, but I like these better.

The other brushes I’m using are the Yohino brand from Amazon(:

Then I quickly switched out something. I planned on using at least one color from each medium.

The overalls and from the Prang palette, the hair from the tubes, and the shirt from the Crayola palette.

And the rest was the watercolor pencils. Definitely not one of my favorite illustrations, but for not quite knowing what they’d all be like together, it’s okay.