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Originally Posted by CharlesFreer
The comments already made concerning the time-saving of premixing warm and cool mixtures of oil paint for plein air make sense to me (though I've never painted in oils).
Would a similar pre-painting mixing be of value in watercolor? Perhaps even to the extent of starting out with large underlying washes of cool and warm greys (saving the ultimate white spaces as white)? Does anyone work this way? Any time-saving advantages?
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That's an interesting concept. I was an inveterate watercolourist before turning to oils recently. I always premixed large puddles of my three primaries before putting brush to paper, but never the greys.
One of my main aims was to keep my colours clean so I would be concerned about making too much mud if I had unfettered access to premixes with more than a couple of colours. I often do an underwash of colour, but if it consisted of pre mixed greys it is possible that the transparent nature of watercolour would result in a finished painting suitable for a bathing hippopotamus.
I do think, however, that many artists make beautiful paintings with more subtle colours than I end up with, and that grey in all it's guises is a very frequent colour in our typically grey atmosphere in Britain. (I do tend to stay inside on grey days and do other things, perhaps that is another habit I should change)
I find in oil painting (for me) my colour mixing regime is much more deliberate than it ever was in watercolours, which consisted of a splodge of this a drop of that (actually with more consideration than that sounds-but you get the idea?) but with the overriding concept of keeping it 'clean'.
I have promised myself a year of exclusively oils so that I give myself chance to get a handle on it, and am resisting the temptation to take out my watercolours, but I await with interest to see what others feel about it as an idea.
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