TRC USA’s TRAVEL & SKETCH Collaboration and Watercolor Exploration with April Wu

This is a recording of our live demo from Wednesday, June 14th with Art Toolkit founder Maria Coryell-Martin and April Wu from TRAVELER’S COMPANY USA to learn about the second collaboration of the TRAVEL & SKETCH Limited Edition Palette Series.

In the demo, April showcased the new palette offerings, the TRC USA Limited SPIRAL RING NOTEBOOK, and her favorite sketching techniques with watercolor. We also discussed the Explore Palette Plus color palette and what kinds of fun color mixing you can do with it.

April shared some follow-up notes that we have listed below, along with photos of the color mixes and notebook pages she referenced during the livestream.

April’s Notes

My paint brand of choice in this palette is Holbein, a Japanese watercolor brand with saturated and clean pigments. I arranged it in a rainbow gradient from light and bright colors on the left to darker hues on the right. I also used the Mixing Pans to break up my painting space and I could keep separate hues of my mixes clean and away from muddier colors. These 30 colors contain the basic 12 hues of your Explore Palette Plus, and my personal favorite (and hard to mix) colors such as Lilac, Viridian Hue, and Opera. I also have one pan with white gouache to use as final bright highlights in my sketches.

I love mixing greens, and I experimented with different types of hues I can create using the Explore Palette Plus colors. The key is to remember yellow + blue equals green and have fun with different types of yellow (brown, sienna, umber) and blue (phthalo, turquoise, Prussian). In this cheat sheet, I also demonstrated how to create dimension to a patch of a green tree by adding darker shading at the bottom of the foliage.

Here are ways to mix colors for stone, pavement, sunlit ground, dirt, and brick, common hues found in urban sketching scenarios. Also, experiment with shadows by mixing unexpected colors and being generous with the amount of pigment in the mixes. Because in real life, shadows still reflect some color of the main subject, these mixtures become more interesting shadows rather than just Payne’s Grey or black.

In the quick demo, I demonstrated how I typically take a 3-step approach to filling a picture with watercolor paint: Light base colors, darker shadows, and emphasizing dark spots plus shading on the ground.

Thank you, April, for sharing all of your good notes and sketches! As a final share, she included some promotional sketches for two upcoming events: mark your calendar for an upcoming sketch crawl at Kerry Park in Seattle on July 1st and for Sketcher Fest in Edmonds, WA from July 14th-16th!

Photos courtesy of April Wu.