The Lightweight Sketcher

Richard Bell’s Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, Thursday, 3rd April, 2008

A NEW WATERCOLOUR BOX; I've just painted swatches of the 66 two-colour combinations that are possible with the 12 colours in my Winsor & Newton Artists' Water Colour Lightweight Sketchers' Box. Like the little pocket-box that I've been using recently, the basis of the colour selection is two versions of each of the primaries:

But it's the secondaries that come with these are more earthy than the selection that I'm used to:

The surprises here for me are Burnt Sienna which to me seems to have a chestnut glow to it and Ivory Black, which I would never have chosen for myselt which, as you can see from the penultimate row of my swatches (above, left), is quite useful if you're mixing a froggy or toadish kind of green when you mix it with the lemon or the yellow respectively. I would never have thought of any black as being suitable for mixing.