A messy little watercolor project

Sorry folks, but here comes another nerd-post about art materials. If you feel that customizing watercolor boxes may not be your cup of tea, then stop reading now or you´ll be suffering from total boredom very soon.

I have a small watercolor box that is almost always with me. It´s a quite usual model, a metal box with room for twelve half pans of colors. There used to be a metal holder for the pans in it, but I got rid of it long ago to fit more (and bigger) pans in there.

Lately I´ve felt the need to start using tube colors instead of pans. I want to be able to use a bigger palette when painting at home and with two different palettes it´s cheaper to use tubes for both than to maintain the pan system for one and buy tubes for the other. Also, the pans in the pocket size box were slowly sliding around in spite of the double-coated foam tape I used to try to keep them in place and I have been looking for a solution to this little but annoying problem.

I decided to build permanent compartments for the colors, and found an excellent plastic material for this in a trash container just around the corner (it´s not always a bad thing to live on a building site). I cut the plastic into strips, two to fit the length of the box, and five to fit the width. Then I cut slits into these to be able to assemble them into eighteen compartments. (I hope the images help to get the idea here.) Then I glued it all into the box with silicone (the kind you use when you build kitchens and bathrooms – totally waterproof), making sure there were no holes between the compartments, to avoid colors leaking in to each other. A bit messy, and the finished result is not a pretty sight, but then it wasn´t the sight I was after, it was the function. And after it dried for a couple of hours, I was ready to put the colors in.

Now, watercolors are expensive, and of course I couldn´t just let my pan colors go to waste. So I poured water into all the pans and waited for the colors to dissolve, then I shovelled them over to the new compartments in the box. It was messy like crazy but then they dried just fine (except Schmincke´s Phthalo blue, which took at least a week). When they run out, I´ll just fill them up from tubes.

Now I have the perfect watercolor palette for everyday use. It fits into my pen case, it can be refilled from tubes, it gives each color a bigger surface than the half pans (about the same as the bigger pans, only square), which makes it easy to fill the brushes with paint.

This image shows my current setup of colors (bigger if you click it, of course). I´m quite happy with them, I don´t feel like I need any more colors. I do have two empty compartments in the box, but I´ll just let them stay empty for now.

I sometimes wonder why I do these things… It took time, it was messy, I got Scarlet Lake over the whole kitchen, I went mad a few times, I cursed the silicone tube at least twice, and before I had finished the whole project I was ready to just go out and buy myself a new box and throw the old stuff in the garbage. But as much as I like buying and trying out new art materials, I can´t help feeling very loyal to the stuff that I´ve had for a long time, and that has served well over the years. It felt better to rebuild this old box and keep it working, than to throw it out for something shiny and new. I´m glad I did it. But I would perhaps not rebuild it again in the near future...

Experimenting

Another Moleskine Watercolor day. Been experimenting a bit with colors as well as drawing techniques. Another drawing is up at the Drawing Club today, have a look here.

Time to draw

My summer holidays has begun today, and my bike was waiting impatiently for me this morning to take it out on a ride. So I packed my brand new Moleskine Watercolor and the Lamy Safari pen and my new (or at least rebuilt) watercolor box (featured in a blogpost near you real soon) and let my red Peak take me downtown for some sushi, coffee and drawing. Lovely! I´ll be doing this a lot this summer. Well, maybe not the sushi, that would turn drawing into an expensive habit. The whole day was great, with sun, perfect temperature and nice views.

On my way home, I suddenly saw a fire hydrant in use for the first time ever, and since these thingies were on the EDM challenge list a few weeks ago, I had to draw it. We don´t have the cute above-ground models in Sweden, they are all hidden under the pavements here, with a neat little red sign on the nearest lamp post telling how far and in what direction you´ll find water. I had to hurry drawing it, though, because as soon as I had begun drawing, a lady (yeah, no fire fighters... how exciting is that?) came along with a huge heavy tool and turned it off. Two minutes later, she came back again and took the whole fire hydrant with her and walked off with it. The strangest things happen in this town...

Watercolor Moleskine

Oh joy, I finally got my hands on a Moleskine Watercolor Notebook today. I wasn´t even looking for one, and still, there it was in a store I never would have guessed to find it in. Nice! I bought the big one, and stopped twice on my way home to try it out.

Unfortunately, stupid me didn´t have my watercolors with me, since I´m in the middle of rebuilding my watercolor box (of all the little projects you can spend your time on...) and couldn´t bring it along. I had to add the color when I got home. Still, I did put the paper in this little Moleskine treasure to the test with my Lamy Safari pen in a park, and all went well. In spite of the grain, the pen and ink behaved lovely on the surface. No fibers got stuck in the nib, and the ink didn´t feather at all. No complaints there!

The only problem now is that I am already working in a sketchbook of a similar size, only much thicker than the Moleskine, and I have promised myself not to start new sketchbooks until the old ones are full… Hm. How annoying.

Book forest

I have been in a beech forest for the first time of my life. I´ve seen beech trees before but they don´t grow up in the north of Sweden where I come from, so standing in the middle of that forest on a sunny day was a bit special.

In Swedish, the beech tree is called “bok”, which can also mean book. Which of course always leads to a lot of bad jokes about libraries as soon as we set foot in a beech wood…

Anyways. Magnificent trees. I managed to sit down for a while and capture one in my sketchbook, and spending time looking at that tree made me think that trees are like people in that they have very different body languages. The beech tree looks proud and strong (but kind), the birch-tree is kind of happy and calm, the pine is quiet and lonely and the spruce looks a bit gloomy, perhaps lacking a bit of self-confidence...

Tagged!

Oh, all these Internet novelties... You learn something new every day. I have been tagged. Apparently this is something you do in the blogging part of the electronic world. You get a challenge from someone to do something - write a list on a certain subject or draw something or whatever, and then you´re supposed to post it on your blog for everyone to see.

I´ve been tagged by Jako and Anna and now I´m supposed to make four lists here - five things I have in my purse, five things I have in my closet, five things in my fridge and five in my car. I thought it would be nicer to draw all this stuff than to just write it down, so here it is:

Five things in my fridge: soy sauce, sambal, sushi gari, fresh ginger and garlic (always)


Five things in my closet (yes, we do keep other stuff there along with the clothes): a flashlight, my bike lights, a bicycle repair kit and my bike computer (wow, turned into a bike theme here)


Five things in my "purse" (I´m more the messenger bag kinda girl): the pen case, cell phone, keys, wallet and the Swedish Military lip-salve (I´m not joking. It´s the best.)



As for the car... well. Living in a big town means that if you leave your stuff in the car, you´ll have to learn to live without it sooner or later. So our car contains four seats and a steering wheel. And how fun is that to draw?

EDM challenges no. 59 & 65

Spring is finally here (in Stockholm) and like everybody else I love it. It´s been very much longed for after a long cold winter. But it does have a disadvantage - or millions of them, actually. Pollen. Those nasty little grains flying around, invisible to the eye but very real when it comes to clogging up my face, making nose and eyes itch and run. Which is why I combined two EDM challenges this time - draw a sign of spring and draw your nose.

The usual signs of spring - buds, grass and flowers - are all very nice, but the thing that really makes me go "yep, spring is definitely here" is the day when I have to start carrying at least three different kinds of medicin around with me - one for the body, one for the nose and one for the eyes.

But still. Spring is nice.