2024 Birthday Stash 2: New Media

And here’s the second post of birthday stash. Here’s what we have:

• There are loads of soft pastels. I’ve never used these before but, if pushed, would probably have picke them out as the next new medium for me to try. They’re hand made by Jackson’s and my brother and his wife picked out three sets for me: a 28 pastel portrait set, a 14 pastel green landscape set and a 14 pastel cloudy sky set. A very good choice, reflecting how I’ll probably be using the pastels. There are two duplicate colours among the 56 and it feels a bit short on reds but I’m not complaining. If I can paint portraits with the Sennelier landscape oil pastels then I can do anything.
• Then we have some crystallised watercolours. Sprinkle them on the paper and spray with water and you get all sorts of weird stuff coming out like Ann Blockley brambles or Jean Haines flowers. And I suspect that if I just run a brush through what appears on the paper, I can get some colourful tree trunks. But we’ll see. I bough these using some cash transferred over from my parents in law.
• And finally we have a set of M Graham watercolours, made with honey, again from my brother. These get great reviews and I’m looking forward to giving them a go. Rather than incorporating them into my main palette and mixing them with my other watercolours, I’m going to use them as an extra palette on their own. A bit like getting a really good Lego set and deciding to keep it boxed up separately rather than mixing it in with all the rest of your Lego. Anyway, the five colours (which M Graham package together as a landscape set) are sap green, yellow ochre, dioxazine purple, burnt umber and cerulean blue, although the cerulean is made with pigment PB36 rather than the usual PB35. It feels like a really weird collection with a purple in there and no reds but M Graham would have put a lot of thought into this, so this should be interesting.

There’s other art gear too: some foliage brushes, a pad of black paper for the pastels, a Schminke sampling dot card (which was an interesting freebie thrown in by Jacksons) that I might use to painting a colourful abstract. And the books that I mentioned in an earlier post. Plus plenty of other stuff. I’ve been well and truly spoiled.