I have for some time now been a big fan of Natasha Newton’s artwork, and also of her dreamily soothing YouTube videos where she tries out enormous quantities of art materials. I am a sucker for this kind of stuff anyway, so generally want to purchase almost everything she tries, but the thing that really intrigued me was the (quite hard to say, and spell) Schmincke Horadam super granulating watercolours.
Since I was buying some more paints anyway, I threw a few into my online basket, and ordered the following colours: Tundra pink, Tundra Violet and Forest Blue. When they arrived I was struck by how small, and unassuming they looked. But appearances can be deceptive!
When I started to try painting with them, I was absolutely stunned by how they … well, ‘granulated’, I suppose. I wasn’t necessarily familiar with that expression, but then I started to see what looked like a plain colour settle and pool into the texture of the paper, with the separate pigments in them separating, bringing out blues and browns, or pinks and purples, both I’m the same colour. And once I had seen that, I was ob-sessed.
Video of swatches of granulated watercolours, showing the separated colours and texture.
I went back once they had dried and tried drawing some of the seed heads from my parents’ garden that I sketched last summer. I keep coming back to the shapes of these. I might do a Lino print based on these, what do you think?
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You can buy these really amazing watercolours from Jackson’s Art supplies.
You can find Natasha Newton’s beautiful landscapes and more on her Instagram here, and her YouTube videos are here.
Rachel x