How Many Colours Does a Sketcher Need?
That’s a good question. How many colours does a sketcher need?
If you’re a Travel Sketcher like us - three.
You’ll see how our classes this week certainly used the three combo extremely well and some did their best work. Loose and layered. Every colour gets a chance to bloom.
Gold Coast - we were studying the gorgeous Jacaranda trees. Our swatches used the three colour combo. Foliage = three colours. Tree trunk, another three. The greens - another three. And any of the extra colours can be dropped in as well. Keeps it so so simple.
Moss Vale were studying Trees and Nature. Here the greens were a feature and by starting with your two greens, plonk any one of the other colours in your palette - and you’ll get a wonderful colour variation in your foliage.
Kingscliff were refreshing main shapes and form starting with elipses, and then floral still life.
Our three colour exercise - which we do in New Sketcher classes, is a brilliant example of how minimal you can be. Both aquarelles and watercolours were used in this class. Same great results.
Mosman (last week) had a wonderful Sydney city view stretched out before them (with jacarandas) and a great subject for observing foreground, middle distance and background.
Clear minimal colour was very effective here and of course some areas don’t need colour at all. There was also a very lovely vintage tea setting as a sketch subject, with a few delicious French dessert cakes to get your energy back, once you’d exhausted yourself doing your vista.
Mosman (this week) Sometimes things just click... They were so lucky to be able to hold classes on the porch of this fab local exhibition space PLUS the exhibition was ‘Regenerate’, and full of native species.
Which just happened to be the topic for the day. Yes, a few dogs and a cow made their way in, but hey.
FYI - Our custom palette has a total of 12 colours. We use 8 of those in every sketch. All our three colour combos come from these and we can get every colour under the sun.
The other 4 colours give us an additional pop when we feel like it.
Easy. Light to carry and surprises one with the strength of the pigment we can get from this little palette.
We had such a great time this week and our sketching sessions certainly kept our minds of what was going in a particular election, in a particular country.
Take a look at these great student sketches.
