This Highland calf was keeping out of the sun in the shelter of a mesh awning, venturing out only briefly to check out the food trough.
In his recent book How to Look, Draw & Paint, Matthew Rice argues that you can manage without earth colours by mixing your own, more varied, versions of them from the brighter colours in your palette (see below). I’m keeping this in mind but for speed today I went straight for the yellow ochre, raw sienna, indian red and sepia when I added the colour to my sketches
My aim is to get out drawing in some of our local natural habitats such as heath and woodland this summer but, with only a couple of hours available, I realised that I might find myself spending the first 30 minutes deciding what I should draw, so I headed to Blacker Hall Farm where I knew that I could sit down and get on with it straight away.
Matthew Rice’s Watercolour Palette
I was so taken by Matthew Rice’s go-to watercolour palette, featured in How to Look, Draw & Paint, that I checked to see if it was available as a ready-made selection. I’d love to try it but that would be rather extravagant, as I’ve got equivalents to most, if not all, of these in my Winsor & Newton watercolour boxes. I just need to check my usual tendency to go for the duller earth colours when I’m drawing natural history, landscapes, portraits and architectural subjects. On most occasions for any of those I’d be dipping into the yellow ochre.
Rice’s favourite watercolours are Schmincke, which he finds are the brightest. Despite his suggestion of avoiding duller earth colours, his Indian Yellow appears to be similar to my much-used yellow ochre and raw sienna.