I got new colours! For a long time now, I have been struggling through with a small watercolour pallet of panned colours I bought at Walmart. It was effective for my needs, but the colours were dull, and it was difficult to blend. I didn’t actually plan on buying new paints; however, on my last trip to Walmart, I noticed a box of tubed watercolour paints, cheap enough to justify buying. I’m glad I did. I didn’t realize how difficult my other paints were to use until I was finally free of them. Using tube paints vs pan paints was an interesting switch; I had to relearn how much paint I needed to get lighter or darker shades. To figure this out, I watched yet another TikTok and worked with some red.

Red! Oh, how excited I was to use red. Strangely, my last pallet did not have any vibrant reds. I finally got to paint the spindle tree I was itching to paint. I am in love with how bright this red is. Even just doodling random things with it felt more magical.

I think my favourite is the tree with yellow accents. I love how they blend to look like a fiery autumn tree. I had to be very careful to let things dry to make that work. The small red bird also has some mixing techniques, where I mixed the red with the tiniest amount of blue.

After obsessing over the red, I turned back to the rest of the colours. The little landscapes is a return to what I used to do to practice. I tried to think of different landscapes that called for different colours and techniques (the trees are actually inspired by a walk I did in Mystic Vale!). I did a small mountain range to rest out the variety I could get with blue and then moved on to layering with mushrooms. For the mushrooms, I think the most learning happened off the page as I worked on mixing my tub paints with water and controlling exactly how dark the paints were on the page.