Trying out the blue with a test painting

You may remember my flutter of initial excitement about the possibility of adding a stable blue to my palette. Yesterday I finally tried it in a quick painting in my journal. It worked! It’s so exciting to have this color to use now. But until next year, the supply is very small and I’ll have to go sparing with it. Once the dayflowers begin blooming, I’ll get busy harvesting and storing up more pigment.

How much blue on hand?

At first glance it seems like not much! All the pigment I have is stored in these 3 squares. The darkest one is almost fully saturated. The missing corner is the amount I used to do the blue in my painting in the photo above. It’s a small painting, almost 5 x 7″. There was a lot of pigment in that tiny snip, though, so it does seem to go a long ways. Unless I go wild with blue, I think these squares will last until the flowers bloom again next summer.

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Author/Artist Info
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Madison Woods is a self-taught artist who moved to the Ozarks from south Louisiana in 2005. In 2018 she began experimenting with watercolor painting, using her local pigments. She calls them Paleo Paints, and her artwork features exclusively the lightfast pigments foraged from Madison county, Arkansas. Her inspiration is nature – the beauty, and the inherent cycle of life and death, destruction and regeneration.

Her online portfolio is at www.MadisonWoods.art.

Click here to join her mailing list.