Paintbox Addict

Tiny Daler-Rowney watercolor box

Some people can't live without Louboutins. I can't live with out paintboxes. I'm a 'pan' person not a paint tube person. The formula is different. Paint comes up on your brush more easily from a pan than from dried tube paint. Plus Europe is more pan-oriented so I came to the right place. Not just because of the Victorians took paintboxes with them as they crossed the Sahara. In the US art stores can't be bothered with tiny pans. Tubes are an easier sell. But enough paintbox trivia.

Someone sent me this book thinking I'd be interested, but its the cover that enthralled me.

This what my Kremer Pigment box looked like when it was new.

Ooopla! The before and after...

If you love watercolor paintboxes you start seeing them everywhere...like stacked Popsicles in a store window...

Or brilliantly colored dragée...

L'Eclair de Genie is pure watercolor beauty. Miam miam.

Fun matching icing colors with paintbox colors. More yum.

It must be what drives me nuts about macarons - the round disks of pure color look like they popped out of a kid's paintbox...

L'Occitane's sign is out in the street at Opera. If they just sold a product with this on it I'd buy it in a flash, but they don't. Dommage ;((

What's not to love? Slabs of color by Fabrice Moireau in his Giverny book. Drool-worthy definitely.

*Here's a hot watercolor tip! All new boxes come 'unseasoned'. When you try to mix colors they'll instantly bead up in a most unsatisfactory way. The cure? Put a strong dark color like ultramarine blue or a dark Umber brown coating on the tin and leave it. Then wash off and do again several times. NEVER take Brillo or scouring powder to your box. You'll ruin the finish pronto.

At the SIMP salon of miniatures show on Sunday this dreamy set of paintboxes make any addict's heart beat faster...

Darling N. wants to fix me up with a nice Frenchman. But she's too late! Walking round her neighborhood I fell deeply, madly for this little one. What Frenchman stands a chance against this?

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Paintbox Blues and Reds

Painting your paintbox is a fun thing to do.





 Here's one I did a few years back

 If the paintbox is small it definitely helps

 Sketch it in with Burnt Sienna paint

 Then just color in like a coloring book

 Get to know your paintbox colors

 Make loose swatches of each color in blobs of water on a scrap of paper

 It's easier to do if your water is dirty - easier to see that is

 This Paris paintbox is on the to-do list. The trouble is not eating the macarons in the setup

 Did you do your blobs last weekend?

 The mess of paintboxes I'm playing with at the moment

Paintboxes are so portable. Take yours with you this last weekend of summer.

HAVE A FUN HOLIDAY!

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Color Swatches

I have a bag full of color test sheets I can't throw out.
One of the 1st watercolor lessons you learn is to test out your colors on a paper scrap before putting brush to expen$ive watercolor paper.

I get attached to the test color scraps. Sometimes they're better than the so-called 'work of art'. After watercolor class I'd go round picking up the test scraps off the floor. The colors were lush, splashed on freely. Some of my own color test scraps are far superior to anything else IMO. 

  People tear their hair out daily trying to get their walls to look like some swatch of paper with a divine color on it. They've fallen in love with that color and will settle for nothing else = it's madness. Has this happened to you?  

In many PB posts I'll mix up and match paint colors to whatever I'm writing on about, whether it be macarons, chocolate, swimming pools, cherries, toy birds, ice cream, orange, red, black, pink.  

Long ago I took a color mixing class at Parsons. We could only use 3 primaries - RED + YELLOW + BLUE. We mixed colors until we were blue in the face for 6 weeks.

 

Mixing GREENS is always difficult.

That's the thing about color. It's so easy to fall in love with color. I thought I was mad for RED. All those ridiculous personality tests where they ask you your favorite color, I always put RED. But now I realize it's BLUE I can't stop using all over the place.

I took Dr. Lusher's color test for this post.
It told me:
Hungers for intensity in life and welcomes opportunity to take on challanges.

I love color mixing and matching.

It's one of those nice meditative, mindless activities you can do endlessly, yet at the same time is quite challenging. It's not as easy to match a color as you'd imagine.

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My Sketchbooks

Any artist worth their salt earns their bones filling a gazillion sketchbooks with doodles

I made these when I was in my bookbinding phase.

Delacroix's Le Voyage au Maroc

sketchbooks are one of the best sources when you're considering starting a sketchbook. It's both a diary + sketchbook, drawn and written daily records of his Moroccan travels.

I've always treasured this picture of JMW Turner's leather bound sketchbook. Many of his sketches can be seen in the Tate's Turnercollection in London, where Turner donated much of his artwork.  Closer at hand is the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT. You can actually touch a Turner sketchbook.

Make an appointment first

A Turneresque page from my own sketchbook

Multi-doodles done while doing an artists residency in Poppi, Tuscany

I love to put down blobs of color and then create a little scene on top

Sketchbooks provide the chance to make quick summaries of what you see like a quick camera snapshot. Spontaneous notation is what it's all about. Often preparatory sketches are more personal, more interesting than the final finished painting.

More color blobs + grape picker doodles  

Chateau doodles. The thing about sketchbooks is they are private.
You can be as casual and messy and experimental as you like.No ones going to see what you do...
Well almost no one

 

Some of the sketchbook paraphrenalia you can "collect" in the name of sketching! There are endless art supplies out there waiting to tempt you and every bit as luscious as any pastry.

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Doodling in French

 Ever walk into a shop

 And say to yourself

 'I'm home'.

 That's how I felt when I wandered into EW because a certain well-known shop down the street was closed comme d'habitude. And boy am I glad.

EW - 21, rue St-Paul 'Le Marais' 75004

 EW (Eduardo) on the phone talking away in Portuguese, looked up and said 'Bonjour'.

I responded, 'Tudo bom?'

He smiled and let me wander and poke around all the goodies to my heart's content.

 Eduardo came to Paris 20 years ago to study architecture from Brazil. He opened his tiny closet-sized shop 12 years ago.

 He told me,

'Whenever I get fed up with Paris, I just look out the window and I'm happy again'.

 I was enthralled with the old French school goodies Eduardo has just like at Le Bonbon au Palais - several adorable watercolor boxes called out to me.

 The sweet French china was hard to ignore as well...

 But this old French how-to-draw notebook had my name on it.

 Irresistible.

 Doesn't it remind you of Anna Corba's Doodling in French?

 If you walk into a Parisian patisserie and don't know how to say,

'Please wrap my macarons as a cadeau/gift'

now you can draw it for the vendeuse.

 Anna shows you how to draw a pitcher too. In a restaurant you can 'ask' for a carafe d'eau/Paris tap by simply sketching it on a napkin, instead of spending $$ for a bottle of water.

 It's a perfect gift for the French-obsessed.

 Well I'm off 'home' today...

Do stop in at EW when you're wandering in Le Marais for a fun experience.

Bye Bye Paris!

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