Crafted By Colette

As well as the shiny paints I was playing with the other day, I also got given some tube watercolours for Christmas.

I’ve been more than happy with my Sakura Koi watercolours that I’ve been using for about a year, but my friend and inspiration SamBeAwesome is always raving about the joys of paint in tubes.  So I added an Arteza set to my Amazon wishlist to get around to buying at some point.

And then Christmas came and my lovely generous friends spoilt me rotten as usual.  One of them bought me, among other things, that set of Arteza watercolours.  He also bought me a new three pack of the Arteza watercolour sketchbooks that I love.  A perfectly timed gift because I only had a few pages left of the three pack I already had.

So what makes tube paints so special?  They are very rich, and creamy, and you do get a very strong vibrant colour from them.

I squeezed out a tiny bit of a rainbow of colours into a palette – I would get to the rest of the 24 pack later – and did a bit of swatching.

The rainbow didn’t really have a strong red, so I did select another one from the pack and added that.

When I had my rainbow, I played about for a bit.  Creating a nice rainbow blend which I lettered my name on with a fineliner, and then lots of domes to turn into monsters.

And then I did some painting.

Lots of painting.

I really enjoy painting.  I don’t do it every day, but I do it about once or twice a fortnight, and when I do do it, I do a lot of it.  THis is why I like the Arteza three pack of sketchbooks so much.  I can do a bit on one piece, set that aside to dry and move on to the next piece, and so on.  No horrible impatient waiting.

So when I do painting sessions I generally come away with quite a few pieces.  I also don’t really do very complicated pieces.  A lot of the time I use the paint as a colouring medium for things that I have sketched in pencil and then inked in fineliners.

Sometimes I try things that I can only really do with watercolour. (These were inspired by a Makoccino video on YouTube.)

I am trying to do more pieces organically, with no full sketch down first.  Or just a light outline at most.

And I love to mimic pretty things that I see on Pinterest.

Or follow tutorials from the myriad of talented artists out there.  Like these planets and crystals from tutorials by Witty Gritty Studio on YouTube.

I do love the tube paints.  They are a lot brighter than my pan paints.  But I get a little bit frustrated by the inconvenience of them.  The paint that I squeezed out is still using up that palette.  There’s a lot of unscrewing and screwing of tubes.  There’s a lot of squeezing of paint from tiny tubes, which can get very messy.  Especially if you’re a messy crafter anyway, like me.  There’s reading the tube labels, and the using up of palette space, and lots of other issues.

So I may have bought myself an empty palette to make my own custom one with both my Sakura Koi and my lovely new Arteza tube paints.  But that’s a whole other blog post.