Today I did lots of color testing and figured my new awesome palette. Then I did a drawing in charcoal of my current still life. Overall it was a great day, and I feel like I have learned a lot.
Gonna be a quick post tonight.
I am really excited about my new blog design, so I want to work on that a bit more tonight. And hopefully get it to a point where I can just focus on little bits of customization for the rest of the week.
Here you will see that I was playing with color on Sunday. After painting with Rembrandt paints for the last few paintings I have pretty much figured out my palette for good, well, at least for now.
My new Palette:
Main Colors
- Rembrandt Titanium White
- Rembrandt Permanent Yellow Medium
- Rembrandt Permanent Madder Deep
- Rembrandt Ultramarine Deep
- Rembrandt Burnt Umber
Extra Colors for really intense subjects
- Rembrandt Manganese Blue Pthalo
- Rembrandt Permanent Red Light
- Rembrandt Permanent Lemon
This palette has everything I want. Paint that is nice and buttery, a limited set of colors to focus on color theory, the ability to make every color in the world, easy to store, easy to carry, easy to open, and doesn’t cost very much.

Okay onto tonight’s drawing. I wasn’t really into doing some painting tonight, I felt like I had been painting all day with the color testing that I was doing. So I just focused on drawing my current still life and working on getting the drawing as good as possible.
The Drawing
The Setup
My hierarchy of painting importance
- Drawing
- Value
- Edges
- Composition
- Color
Drawing Comparison
How can I improve the drawing
After Looking at this drawing from being away from it for a while, right away I noticed that the Zen box drawing was really wrong. I know I measured that thing like 20 times, I even was thinking that it was incorrect but I just kept the measurements that I was doing, I wanted to trust them. But they were very very wrong. My next drawing I’m going to figure out why the heck I got this so wrong and correct the error, hoping never to repeat it.
Value
How can I improve the values?
Not too much to say about values, the focus was on the drawing more than anything. I really didn’t work these values up that much.