The Alvin Synchro-Tilt stool actually tilts backward, which is obviously risky, as there is almost no back support, and all weight rests on the single leg with attached star base.

This is one of a series of articles I’ve prepared for readers while I’m offline this month. Comments have been turned off January 1-31.

Ergonomics is an important part of a studio work space, especially if an artist has back or other orthopedic problems. A comfortable, supportive chair or stool is one of the key components of an orthopedically sound working environment.

I normally work standing up, but like to have the ability to sit for short periods of time while working, so a good, adjustable stool has been on my search list for a while. This fall, I researched the reviews and ordered the Alvin Synchro-Tilt stool. This adjustable drafting stool is described as, “Great to use while working on large easel paintings, canvas projects, framing, drafting, filing, and much more,” on Alvin’s website. Online reviews at both Amazon and Dick Blick are overwhelmingly positive, especially by customers with back problems. As a result of my research, I thought I would be getting a good buy.

The stool is well-built and simple to assemble. It has a small back-stop, making it a hybrid between a flat stool and a properly backed chair. One design flaw is that the chair base is set on a slight forward tilt, but the active spring-tilt mechanism only allows backward tilting motion, not a greater degree of forward tilt. In my opinion, this could create a safety hazard, as a sitter could possibly lean backwards and lose their balance.

Unfortunately, after 2 weeks of daily use, I realized it was aggravating my sciatic problems. The hard ridges across the seat and the fact that the stool does not tilt forward, but backward were 2 probable causes. Another likely problem is that when I work standing, my desk is about 39″ high, so the stool set to its full height caused me to hyperextend my legs, as there is no adjustable foot ring or support. I called Dick Blick to get a return authorization number, which was sent promptly via email.

And there my real problem began. Disassembling the chair is basically impossible. The metal box-shaped base component of the chair assembles by a pressure fit onto the stool’s central support pole. Once on, it would not come off. I’m of average weight, and not a rambunctious, bouncy sitter, but after 2 weeks, it was stuck on for good. The Wrenaissance Man, who is very fit and very mechanically inclined, could not pull the two pieces apart, and declared that it was clearly manufactured to stay assembled once assembled.

So returning this chair is not an option. I have slightly adapted it by reversing the seat on the seat-base box with longer bolts so that it will tilt forward, and by lowering my desk when I use it. Eventually, we’ll probably sell it in a garage or moving sale.

The lesson here is that back and orthopedic conditions are individual problems requiring individual solutions. This chair clearly works for a lot of artists and crafters who are back patients. I recommend that you borrow this chair from a friend or lease it from an office-furniture store for a week or two before you splash out the cash. Once you’ve decided on purchasing this chair, Dick Blick offers the best price on both the chair and shipping. It is also available through Daniel Smith via website and catalog and Texas Art Supply by special order.

Botanical artist and blogger Mindy Lighthipe has announced a painting challenge on her website. The challenge is called, “30 Leaves/30 Days,” and the goal is to paint one leaf every day of the month of October.

This challenge is also being sponsored by the Botanical Artists blog. This group of botanical artists and illustrators are a private group on Facebook, and also have an invitation-only group on Flickr for critiques and comments. While both the Facebook and Flickr groups are by invitation only membership, anyone can post comments on the blog. Images on the Flickr page are available for viewing only by non-members, no posting or comments.

I’ll be taking part in this challenge independently, since I’m not a member of this group. Of course I need the practice in observation and rendering—who doesn’t?—but I’m really hoping this will increase my speed. Working on a series of small works with straightforward composition in a limited time period should conquer perfectionism and overthinking.

Will you be joining in the fun? October is a great month for colorful foliage, if you live in zone 8 and northwards. We here in zone 9b will have to get acquainted with some of our tropical transplants.

Looking forward to seeing everyone’s works online!

Update: Mindy Lighthipe has mentioned in the comments section that applications are welcome to the Facebook/Flickr groups. She has graciously offered a contact link on her blog for those who would like to apply.

This grid shows some of the gorgeous hues that resulted from mixing 50/50 portions of the red-violet spectrum of my own paintbox. I included the red-trending earth pigments of burnt sienna and sepia, as well as one of the warm reds, cadmium red deep, in the group of colors used.

Isn't it interesting to see the slight hue difference between Winsor Newton's alizarin crimson and the same pigment by Holbein?

What colors will contrast and coordinate best with these dark reds? Try using complementary colors from the opposite side of the color wheel, the green family:

Green mixes, top to bottom: Ultramarine and new gamboge(WN); indigo & cad. orange (WN); ultramarine & cad. lemon (WN); Sleeping Beauty turquoise (DS); and indigo & cad. lemon (WN)

Analogous colors from the orange and yellow side of the spectrum will harmonize with crimson and plum:

This chart looks very 1960s to me! I did use one complementary pairing—dioxazine purple is sandwiched at lower left between two slabs of new gamboge.

For further inspiration, here are some links to some classic artworks with palette mixes echoing this fall’s trend for deep reds:

• Mark Rothko painting using magenta with green and orange at MoMA
• Bonnard’s palette included a wide range of pinks, oranges and reds. He even used hot-toned crimson for shadows! Here are some videos from the Metropolitan Museum of Art about his late interiors.
• Paul Klee was a subtle and brilliant colorist. His Rose Garden from 1920 uses many tones of deep red and violet.
• Raphael’s portrait of Pope Julius II uses a sharp contrast of red with malachite green
• Maria Sybilla Merien, the intrepid explorer of Surinam’s tropical forests, combined purple with moss green in this etching of a butterfly’s metamorphosis. Note how the wing silhouette visually rhymes with the leaf shapes!

Happy painting!

Today let’s experiment with the value ranges and intensities of different yellow watercolor pigments.

Below is a photograph of a graduated wash of all the yellow pigments in my paintbox. From left to right: Ochre yellow, New Gamboge, Naples yellow, Hansa yellow, cadmium lemon yellow, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium orange, and Holbein’s proprietary Jaune Brilliant.

The natural yellow earth-mineral and lake pigments are more transparent and sedimentary than the cadmium pigments.

To repeat this experiment for yourself, draw a rectangle with lightly marked individual squares. Fully charge your brush with pigment, using only enough water to make the paint liquid and paint the first square. Make a graduated wash by dipping your brush in water, knocking off the excess, and starting at the end of the first square, paint the next square. By stroking your brush along the side of the previous square each time you start a new row, the pigment will flow from the concentrated end to the diluted end of the color strip.

By converting this photo to grayscale and measuring with Photoshop’s eyedropper tool, we can see that none of the yellows renders more than a light mid-tone value, even painted with a brush fully charged with concentrated pigment. Value ranges from a dark 145R, 145G, 145B for New Gamboge to a pure white 255R, 255G, 255B for the Hansa yellow light.

Both Hansa yellow light and cadmium lemon yellow light blow out to white in this grayscale rendering.

Painting a value strip repeatedly with the same diluted concentration of pigment in water allows you to accurately measure the increasing intensity of yellow. I adapted the following exercise from an assignment in mixing shades of black on page 96 of Contemporary Botanical Illustration: Challenging Color and Texture by Rosie Martin and Meriel Thurstan .

A more precise value scale for yellow pigments using a 1:10 paint:water ratio.

To measure the relative strength of the yellows on your own palette: Draw a thin rectangle for each yellow in your paintbox and divide each into 10 equal squares.

Mix each paint roughly 1:10 with water and paint each strip evenly with one of the yellow washes.

Let dry thoroughly, then repeat 9 more times with the same diluted paint mixture, each time painting one less square. At the end of the experiment, each rectangle should have one square that’s been painted 10 times, 9 times, 8 times, etc.

As you can see, even with 10 coats of watercolor, none of the yellow paints provides a deep or intense value tone!

Next in this series: Mixing colors to render shadows on yellow objects.

Yellow is a difficult family of colors to work with in the studio. No other color is so easy to contaminate as yellow. Just the tiniest grain of another pigment will turn a creamy butter yellow to a rotten egg green or muddy tan.

Rendering shadows and dimensionality is another challenge. Just what color should you use to paint the shadow of a yellow object? The unthinking choice of black will turn the shadows an olive lime green. Color theory states that the complement of a color should be used to mix the shadow tones, but mixing yellow with its opposite, violet, results in a muddy brown.

Your eye sees yellow fruits, but the eyedropper tool reveals many different hues.

This photo of some yellow fruits shows some of the range of hues in both the shadows and the specular highlights. I used the eyedropper in Photoshop to pick out the different tones. Notice how the green color of the unripe fruit is still apparent in the ripe specimens.

From greenish ochre to orange tan, an egg is more than just yellow.

Eggs, butter and cheese are more examples of objects that we think of as yellow, but which contain many other hues within the main color. As measured by Photoshop’s eyedrop tool, the objects below fit our preconceptions of the shades found in the yellow color family.

Do the colors of these dairy products really match our idea of what is yellow?

Some shades of brown are deep, desaturated shades of yellow. Other browns are actually in the red family.

Always observe the colors in your subject matter. The actual shade is not always what your intellect tells you it ought to be.

Next: A look at some yellow watercolor pigments and their value ranges.

Studio set up to photograph my botanical illustrations.

On Monday afternoon, the Wrenaissance Man was kind enough to share his photography skills and equipment to help me photograph my completed botanical illustrations.

Because of the tiny details in the artwork and the size of the images, I was reluctant to stitch multiple scans together. I also had concerns that the multiple-pass scan method would crease or dent the fine Italian cotton watercolor paper, rendering the originals useless for exhibit or sale.

By using a high-resolution camera and some simple fill flashes, the resulting photographs should be flexible enough to use for reproduction ranging from the Web to my business promotions to print-on-demand goods such as posters or limited-edition gicleés.

I look forward to posting an up-to-date portfolio page of my botanical work soon!

Three sturdy bookcases! Studio re-organization in progress

There was a reason why the tall bookcase cost only $49.99! In February, the shelves collapsed under the weight of my books. In a classic case of project spiral, the need to shelve all my books morphed into a quest to re-organize my studio in a more useable layout for the long term.
Some things to note about owning a lot of books:
Interior designers say that books are a “lovely touch to a lived-in home,” but the truth is, they are thinking of an artfully stacked grouping of two or three coffee-table books, or a handful of delicate antique tomes forming the base of a little still life on the entry table. They’re usually horrified by giant stacks of mixed size, mixed topic, mixed condition books that are actually read.

Ugly to a decorator, but not to me: Now even my sketchbooks have a home!

Bookworms find a wall of books comfortable and relaxing. Non-bookworms find this oppressive and jarring.
Annual culling is a practical way to make sure the books you have are the ones you really want to keep around. Call your local library to see if they accept donations. For art history and technique books, call a community arts group to see if they’d like a donation to their teaching library.
Heaviest books on the bottom shelf. Always, always, ALWAYS!

They look so innocent! Stacks of heavy books break backs and bookcases.

What a queen! The beautiful nun's cap orchid in full blossom in my garden.

I was introduced to Phaius tankervilleae during the illustration course at the Jardim Botanico. Our class went painting at the orchid conservatory and the dusky-peach, vanilla and burgundy tones on this orchid’s arched petals enchanted me. Unfortunately, the specimen was near the end of its bloom cycle and when I returned the next week the petals had fallen.
How amazing to see this beautiful orchid at last fall’s Houston Bulb Market! I just had to buy one, especially when I heard that they would naturalize in Houston’s zone 9b climate. With a little bit of coddling, it survived our 2-week cold snap in late January.
This spring P. tankervilleae blossomed in my own backyard! I started some sketches and color studies in order to begin a full-scale painting of the nun’s cap orchid and its delicate forms and colors.

This sketch was made in Rio's Jardim Botânico. The blossoms' heavy droop shows how late they are in their cycle.

Exuberant chicken scratches record and measure data about size and color.

This contour drawing was made early in the cycle when the buds outnumbered the blossoms.

The big question now is composition of the final painting. The bloom head of the orchid is separated from the leaves by 12″-18″ of spindly stalk. The leaves are broad and grassy green, but coarsely ribbed. Should I focus on the flower heads spiraling up the stalk, add a small vignette of the entire plant, or depict the full specimen with its dumbbell distribution of forms?
Decisions, decisions!

Top left: W-N Sepia graded wash. Top right: Holbein Gray Violet. Mixes on right, starting 2nd from top: 50/50 mix of sepia and gray-violet; mostly gray-violet; mostly sepia.

I mixed this soft shade of warm, brown-violet gray while working on the hamadryad butterfly painting. (“Gray” is the color theory term for a color mixed from secondary or tertiary colors.)
To mix this desaturated hue, use equal parts sepia and (Holbein) gray-violet.
Because gray-violet is listed as only “moderate” on the lightfastness scale, I recommend you use it for works made for reproduction or personal use. (thus the qualifying “perhaps” in the title! )

Far left: Graded wash of pure potter's pink. Top row, from left: Mix with Holbein Brilliant Jaune 1; New Gamboge; W-N Ultramarine; D-S Sleeping Beauty Turquoise. Bottom row, from left: Caran D'Ache Supracolor II, 3888-051; Holbein Organic Vermilion; W-N Indigo; D-S Lapis Lazuli.

When it comes to buying watercolors, I’m like a kid let loose in a candy store–I want one of everything.
I bought this potter’s pink from Daniel Smith a few years ago as part of a “buy x, get 1 free” sale. This is such a useful color! Potter’s pink is a subdued, yet very rosy pink which granulates in an even pattern and granulates any mix you blend it with. It sparkles subtly, due to the granulation, but not in a metallic way that would be unusable for reproduction. Pinkcolor, as it’s also known, is a pigment used historically for ceramic glaze colors and transferware in English potteries. It was also popular with English artists like Turner and Constable in their landscape and portrait watercolor sketches.
I find it a great choice for muted tones, such as roots, shoots, moths, wattles, claws, etc. This would be a very useful color in all kinds of flesh tone blends, from pale and rosy to tawny ambers or cocoas.
Potter’s pink is available from several different brands, so you should be able to find a tube from your favorite art supplier.