New finds from Maine vacation

(C) 2015 Photograph Dale DiMauro

On our recent excursion along the the coast of Maine I purchased the above art materials. The three tubes of watercolor paint I have already put to great use. They include Payne's gray by M. Graham & Co., which I ran out of in Maine. It is a cool color that dries much lighter than it comes out of the tube. I found a heavily discounted raw umber, manufactured by Winsor & Newton, which I use quite often for warming up an area of snow or for sunny distant woodland branching. The third tube is new to me, shadow green made by Holbein. With this cool green I seem to get a better deep water or ocean color with many variations of cools related to it.

The little watercolor block we found at the Currier Art Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire on our way back Sunday. It is only six inches by six inches, but I was able to do a little watercolor sketch of my father-in-law as a way to get a feel for the paper, as it is new to me.

The conte' pencil, in sanguine color, I found at the Portland Art Mart, where I had picked up two of the paint tubes. It provides a real terra cotta feel to portrait drawings with a rough scratchy mark or fine detail for the contour of a nose. So in the end we have more than photographs and memories to draw upon. Pun intended.