Not feeling great today, but I did manage to do some important experiments in my sketchbook. I’m looking for a good alternative to a ‘fake’ cobalt teal watercolor that I picked up (spoiler alert: it has cobalt in it!). On a whim, I thought it would be a good idea to swatch out all of my blues and teal/turquoise colours to do a comparison:

Here we have them more or less arranged from warm to cool. I like the Amazonite for a good ‘Detroit River Blue.’ But it’s not the workhorse colour I’m looking for to replace either Sap Green or the Cobalt Teal. My next attempt will be adding some Chinese White to each of these to see if that gets me closer to the cobalt teal, without the heavy metals.

I’ve also, for the first time, tried sea sponges as a painting tool! Yes, I don’t think I’ve ever done this before. It was a lot of fun, and it has promise for getting more texture out of my non-granulating colours. I really feel like granulation and texture are going to be key factors in this project, where the atmosphere and background is going to have a lot of context.