Cath Sheard Art

Tag: Sarah Renae Clark

  • Yonder Paints – wow!

    I recently purchased the ‘Under the sea’ set of paints from Yonder Paints, a small artisanal business in Otepoti Dunedin, here in New Zealand. The set came in its own wee tin and the half pans have a wee magnet on the base to hold them in place. They make their own binder, which includes clove oil as a preservative, and they’re all hand-milled in small batches. My parcel included a hand written note, watercolour swatch cards and a couple of sample dots. Just lovely!

    That’s all great, but what about the actual paints? Put it this way, my second set arrived today … eight colours selected by me, again in their own tin. The paints wet well, the colours are vibrant, they blend beautifully – I’m in love!

    I haven’t got pieces photographed, because life has been happening, but I’ll do that over the weekend. In the meantime, shown below is what I received today, and the swatch cards I did for ‘Under the sea’. I use the Swatchdex swatch cards from Sarah Renae Clark, and find they’re great.

    This is the set I received today. I love the colours I’ve chosen.
    Swatch cards for Under the Sea
    Yes, I swatched one colour twice. Oops!

  • Practising the basics

    It’s always useful to practice basic skills like colour mixing, composition and mark making. I’ve been slowly coming to the realisation that I’ve lost some of my own style, especially in terms of mark making. There’s a couple of reasons for that, which it’s probably not useful to document.

    How to fix it? De-influencing myself through less time watching other artists online. Looking at other artist’s work is fine but, for me anyway, watching them work is often detrimental unless it’s a specific technique I want to learn.

    The other thing I’m doing is practicing the basics by colour mixing, inspired by Sarah Renae Clark’s Colour Cubes, then doing a small piece in those colours, an idea I got from Denise Love. That said, I’m making a conscious effort to use my brush strokes and my marks to ensure the hand of the artist shows.