Two New Artgraf Blocks

I’ve meaning to do this for ages but I finally got around to buying red and green Artfraf blocks to extend my collection to eleven colours. I’ll pass on graphite and white and wait for another primary colour. Cerulean blue would be good. What finally tipped it for me was finding the ideal plastic container to keep up to twelve blocks in at B&M in Rainham. Cost me less than a fiver too. I always make a point of browsing around these cheap household goods shops; sometimes you find something there that you’ve been looking for for years and never found.

Anyway, I thought I’d better redo my swatches, including a crosstable of mixes. I also thought I’d check out the blue/sepia mix, just to see whether it produced the same sort of battleship grey as a mixture of French ultramarine and burnt sienna in watercolour. Spoiler: it does.

You can see I screwed up in one place by having brown and dark brown the wrong way round. And I still reckon the manufacturers have got sepia and the lighter of the browns the wrong way round.

I do want to start using these Artgraf blocks more. In mixing colours in that grid I was reminded of how different these feel to watercolours when used as pans. I don’t know whether it’s the medium or the hot pressed paper that I use with it, but I can push the paint around more than I can with watercolour. It all feels a bit more physical.