The night before my camping trip I was thinking about all the sunrises I wanted to paint and if you’ve been following my other posts I’ve been trying to recreate the perfect sunrise once witnessed (Pink sunrise – obsession with painting pink clouds and testing Baohong paper). I was refilling my art pocket pallets to bring in my A5 and A6 journal cases and was wondering if I should bring the white gouache but didn’t want to muddy my clean transparent paints so at the spur of the moment I decided to make up a new pallette with premixed colours and pastel colours.
This is similar to my warm and cool triad pallete (More plein air kits for the different styles of painting including new warm and cool triad pallete). Here I’ve chosen a cool triad of Hansa yellow light, quinacridone rose permanent and ultramarine. I added them in their separate half pans and then did another set mixed them with white. I then mixed the secondary colours of purple, orange and green and then filled another set of pans with white gouache. Using the same primary colours as a base will mean there is unity in the painting.
So this is what I ended up with
Instead of my normal lamp black I decided to try mixing Jane’s grey using Jane Blundell’s original recipe (https://janeblundellart.blogspot.com/2014/02/custom-made-watercolour-mixes-janes-grey.html) basically equal parts ultramarine and burnt sienna. I only have burnt sienna light (I purposely bought this as I figured I could darken it with some black and make burnt umber).
Here’s some of the been sunrises I managed to paint see if you can spot the ones using pastels!
Rachel Fong Art 