Mix: A late winter palette

This is the second of four emails this week that are part of a botanical art challenge leading up to the spring equinox. I am a watercolor painter, but whatever your medium is (photography, writing, digital artist…), you are welcome to join or just follow along. Everyone will have access to the prompts! Paid subscribers will have access to the full post, videos, and community chat.

Welcome back.

I hope you enjoyed your adventure yesterday and that you were able to find some interesting botanical things to work with.

Today, we are going to create a color palette using the things you found yesterday. This is where you really need to look carefully–if you think a dried leaf is brown, you are probably right, but I’m betting it has a lot of browns and maybe a little gray, some reds or yellows? And that twig, is there any lichen growing on it?

Now it’s time to take a look at the items you found and start looking at the colors. If you are a painter, start mixing your paints and see how many colors you can come up with based on the items in your collection. If you are a writer, how would you describe the items in terms of color? How detailed can you get?

It can also be helpful to write down the recipes for the colors you create, particularly if you are newer to mixing paints. That way, you can create that perfect color you came up with when you go to make a painting. And remember that there are no rules here; if this process leads you somewhere interesting, by all means, go there! Tomorrow, we will start looking at ways to create compositions using the items we found. But first, I want to show you my process for mixing colors and creating my recipe card.

Mixing colors