Images from the Shanghai Biennial...

Opening reception begins

I discovered that there were some new pictures of the Shanghai Zhujiajiao International Watercolour Biennial on their website, including some views of the actual gallery displays.  To my delight, I saw my own painting in one of the photos, although you almost need a magnifying glass to see it!! 

They have a short slide show that covers some of the opening ceremony activities in addition to the gallery images. If you'd like to check it out, you can click here.  You can either view the slide show or click on the individual thumbnail images to enlarge them. To begin the slide show, hover your mouse over the large image to bring up the start button. My blue morning glory painting appears on the far back wall in the next to last slide, shown below.

Pigment Play: Lunar Black

Daniel Smith's Lunar Black & friends

Playing with paint is a great way to get to know the properties of the pigments on your palette. From color mixes to novel textures, the opportunities for discovery are endless. Starting today, I'm occasionally going to share some of my experiments and hope you'll be inspired to try some of these yourself.  For the record, I am not affiliated with any of the watercolor manufacturers and will simply feature whatever grabs my attention.

One of the most unusual watercolor paints on the market is Daniel Smith's Lunar Black.  Consisting of Mars black and black iron oxide, it yields fabulous granulation effects -- either by itself or when mixed with other paints.  In the photo above, you see the Lunar Black at the center of the top sample. At the far left is a mixture of Daniel Smith's Quinacridone Deep Gold and Lunar Black. Far right, Daniel Smith's Transparent Pyrrol Orange mixed with Lunar Black. In my experience, it's best mixed with clear strong colors, but it's just plain fun to play with -- I encourage you to get a tube and experiment. As with any granulating paint, you need to lay down a reasonably wet wash and leave it alone until it's dry. Any rebrushing or attempts to add to the wash will disrupt the granulation.

Lunar Black also has a unique property -- because of the use of iron oxide, the paint responds to manipulation with magnets.  In the bottom sample, you see a square of plain Lunar Black on the left. In the center, I've held a small circular magnet under the paper in various places while the wash was still wet to get a dot pattern.  On the right, I took a somewhat larger magnet and moved it around continuously under the paper to concentrate the pigment. If you look closely, you can see evidence of swirling as the magnet attracts the iron particles in the paint. I'm not sure exactly how I'd use this feature in my paintings, but I think it might have promise for landscapes or abstract work.

Until next time, that's it for Pigment Play!!

New mugs in my Zazzle store...

Spring fever gave me the idea to add a few items to my Zazzle store. Friends have been asking for mugs featuring some of my vintage salt shakers and a few other images, so I got busy a few days ago and set up some new pieces.  These samples that arrived today look great and I've added them to the store.  The images appear on both sides -- that way your breakfast mates can enjoy the art too!! Choose from Old Salt, Blue Peeps, and Morning Glorious -- or any of the other mugs or postage stamps in the shop. Just click on this link: ChrisBeckStudio to see all the goodies.

p.s. The title of the painting shown on the Blue Peeps mug is "What Did You Expect From Marshmallow Eggs?"

Tech Talk: Pigments – Week 2

 Lightfastness -- comparing full strength paint

(bottom half is sun exposed strip)

 

Lightfastness -- comparing tints

(top half is the sun exposed strip)

Two weeks ago, I began testing these Mission Gold watercolors. (See the original post here.) After painting the test strips, I cut the page in half and put one piece in my flat files and the other in a spot that would get direct sun. Following my plan to compare the sheets every two weeks, I put the two pieces together today, first comparing the full-strength strips and then the lighter washes.

There are a few changes at this point, although nothing drastic. As might be expected, the tints (light washes) were generally affected more than the full-strength colors.  Prussian blue faded slightly in the tint, as did burnt sienna -- both a bit of a surprise, since the pigments listed on the tubes are supposedly lightfast.  There was also a slight darkening of the yellow, particularly noticeable at full strength. The tint of Van Dyke brown faded slightly.  Neither of these was unexpected -- the yellow pigment was rated as fugitive by both Michael Wilcox and Hilary Page and the brown is unlisted, but its closest relatives are considered fugitive.

It's worth noting that the sun-exposed strip has had only a few hours of sun a day on the best days and we had 4 or 5 days of deeply overcast weather in the past two weeks. I'll continue to monitor the test strips and will post again when there is more information.

Update on the Shanghai Biennial...

Morning Glorious

watercolor, 15" x 18"
Chris Beck

Responding to a request from one of my readers, I'm posting this quick note about events following the Shanghai Zhujiajiao International Watercolour Biennial Exhibition.  My painting has been included in a travelling show that appeared at the Child Welfare Institute Children's Palace Shanghai from January 19-27, 2013.  From there it goes to one of the most visited landmarks in Shanghai, the Oriental Pearl Tower Shanghai, where it will hang from February 7-17, 2013.  And because the exhibit coincides with the Chinese New Year holidays, they are expecting up to 30,000 visitors per day.  Pretty heady stuff!!

You can read a bit more about this at the Biennial Exhibition website.

Tech Talk: Pigments

Watercolor test strip

I'm going to do a number of posts on the technical aspects of painting with watercolors. To start things off, I want to talk about paints. I was inspired to begin this series after receiving a couple of sample sets of a new line of watercolors, Mission Gold, a few months ago. I'll talk more later about the color test strip shown above, but first let's talk about how you can check the pigments used in your paints.

The first thing I do with an unfamiliar tube of watercolor is to look on each tube for the pigment information.  These days, all reputable brands of watercolor list the pigment number or numbers on each tube.  I've circled the numbers to make them easy to find on this assortment of watercolors from various manufacturers.

Pigment numbers (circled)

Pigment numbers are in the form PY## for yellows, PO## for oranges, PR## for reds, etc.  Once you have the pigment number (or numbers in the case of a mixed color), you can check several sources to learn more about them.  For years, I have relied on The Wilcox Guide to the Best Watercolor Paints and Hilary Page's Guide to Watercolor Paints.

You can check the raw pigments as well as the ratings for individual manufacturer's paints.  Hilary Page has tested all the paints herself and gives personal ratings, pointing out her favorites in each color, but Wilcox gives the most comprehensive information on the raw pigments -- pointing out pigments that may be suitable for oil or acrylic paints, but not for watercolors. 

There is also an online resource by Bruce MacEvoy.  He has created an exhaustive catalog of information related to watercolor, with a very thorough section on pigment information. By clicking on the color links at the top of that page, you can see every pigment by number along with detailed information about each one. There is an overwhelming amount of material, but for the purposes of this post, the critical thing is the lightfastness rating (Lf), the column at the rightmost edge of the rating tables. Lightfastness is rated from 1-8, worst to best.

 Now back to my color tests.  After looking up the pigment numbers on the paints in my sample sets, I was very concerned because some of them were ranked as fugitive or unreliable by both Wilcox and Page.  However, since this is a new line, neither Wilcox nor Page has tested the actual paints, so I decided to do my own lightfastness tests.  I had 14 unique colors in the sample sets, so I took an 11x14-inch piece of watercolor paper and divided it into 14 equal spaces.  I printed out the color name and pigment numbers in the center of each space and then painted a full-strength stripe across the middle of the paper, with identical lighter stripes on each side of the center. You'll notice I blotted out the paint at the center of the darker colors in order to see the names and pigment information. (I also lifted a stripe down the right side of each color, but that is unrelated to my test for lightfastness. I merely wanted to see how staining each color was.)

I cut the paper down the middle, labelled the backs, and taped one to a piece of acid-free matboard that I set where it will get as much full sun as possible. The other half is sandwiched between two pieces of acid-free matboard and tucked into a flat file drawer.  At present, the daily dose of sun is not great -- a few hours at best -- but my plan is to compare the two halves of the test sheet every two weeks for at least 6 months.

Stay tuned.

Wrapping up my two-day workshop...

Sunday afternoon, near the end of the workshop

Just wanted to share a few pictures and a little bit about my workshop at Guy Magallanes' Studio this past weekend. I had nine students -- three from southern California (Bakersfield and Altadena) and six local artists -- including Guy and his partner in Art2Art, Joyce Faulknor. I had a great time teaching the workshop and, from the feedback I got, I think everyone attending had a fun time too!!  

My thanks to Guy for hosting my return to the workshop scene -- couldn't have asked for a better host or more congenial workspace. I greatly appreciated his support and encouragement!! Guy has also posted more pictures of the weekend with two blog entries, here and here.

Guy posts the finished paintings for review

I enjoy working at a level of detail that sometimes gives even me the heebie-jeebies, so I recognize that it can be daunting, but everybody tackled the myriad details with good cheer and determination. I also presented several options for the background.

 All our ducks in a row!!

Seeing all the finished paintings lined up together was a treat -- and I enjoyed the creativity that people took in customizing the backgrounds in their paintings. Some of the group even came prepared to do multiple paintings so they could try out several background options.

Dippy Duck #4

watercolor, 8" x 8"

Chris Beck

This is my finished demo piece, and he proudly takes his place in what is a growing line of these fun ducks with their outsized red bills. I was very excited to discover a new way of creating the background design as I experimented in preparation for the weekend. The process is fun and quite easy to do but gives a complex finished look. I'm going to be adding it to my workshop bag of tricks and look forward to sharing it with more of you as I schedule more workshops.

Playing around for my workshop...

 

Duck in progress

watercolor, 8" x 8"

Chris Beck

 Detail of background

I'm in the middle of my two-day workshop and I just wanted to share a fun idea that I came up with while I was preparing my teaching materials.  I often use fabric as a resource for background patterns for my little ceramic creatures, trying to relate the imagery in some way to the subject.  I usually do a direct painting of the patterns, but in the course of experimenting with different techniques this past week,  I stumbled on a really cool way of creating the pattern and wanted to show the results.  I demo'd this in class yesterday and got a very enthusiastic reaction from everyone in the class. Really looking forward to using this in more of my work.

I'm the Friday Feature artist today...

 Morning Glorious

watercolor, 15" x 18"

Chris Beck

I'm very honored to be the featured artist on Carrie Waller's blog this week!!  Carrie is a very talented watercolorist in her own right and a most generous friend.  I especially enjoyed doing the interview because it allowed me to share some things that are not usually included in the standard artist bio or statement.  Hope you'll take the time to pop over there and check out the feature.  While you're there, take some time to look at Carrie's work too -- she has some very cool subjects and her works are all beautifully painted!!

Shanghai Zhujiajiao Exhibition...

Morning Glorious

watercolor, 15" x 18"

Chris Beck

I just heard that my painting "Morning Glorious" has been juried into the Shanghai Zhujiajiao International Watercolour Biennial Exhibition.  The reception will be sometime in the latter part of November, date still to be finalized.  There have been several delays in the schedule this year and I'd given up all thought of going, but with enough time to make travel plans, it might be feasible.  Better start mining the couch for spare change!!