Triadvent Wrap-up

I’ll post links to every day of Triadvent, and reflect on what I liked, what I learned, and what I’d do differently next time!

What I liked

I found painting triads to be a relaxing, fun exercise. Each day’s work consisted of:

Choosing a triad randomly
Painting a routine color wheel
Searching for a reference that would showcase the available colors
Painting the reference using the colors in a small size (5.3 x 3.38 in, or 13.5 x 8.5cm, the size of an Art Toolkit Folio Palette, which I traced to make the picture box).

I found this to be a reasonable and sustainable amount of work for 1 long or 2 short painting sessions within a day. The amount of direction and routine was helpful to keep me on guiderails and prevent me from feeling that I didn’t know what to do next, but there was also creativity and choice involved in choosing the reference and deciding how to approach it.

Lynne wrote about how the amount, interestingness, and challenge of a challenge can make or break it, and I agree this challenge balanced those things well, though I’m also glad it’s ending because it took up all my painting time so I’m ready to do other things.

What I learned

My preferred subjects are landscapes.

Through sheer repetition of choosing a reference each day, I feel like I learned about my own preferences for what I like to paint. I had literally no guidelines on what to paint except that I wanted to choose a subject that showcases the colors in the color wheel. This could be anything. My fellow Triadvent painters chose varied subjects, including urban scenes, pets, still lifes of art supplies, botanical art. I only painted landscapes. A few times I considered something else – a close-up of a cactus, a wrapped present – but I dragged my feet on painting and put it off until late in the day and each time only recovered my excitement for painting the sample scene when I swapped it for a landscape. So, lesson learned about my preferences.

I miss working with my own photos.

Something I began to miss was using my own subjects! I didn’t feel that I had enough variety in my personal camera roll to choose subjects that matched the color palettes, so it was easier for me to use the large Paint My Photo network or Unsplash. But I’ve come to really like and value working with my own subjects, and I only realized toward the end of the month that this project had me missing it.

My paint preferences are very subjective and feelings-based.

By test-driving each of the paints in my collection within a short period of time, I became reacquainted with which paints I love and enjoy. Some paints, when I began to paint with them, I just felt, “Yes!” A positive subjective reaction based on no specific objective criteria. Others, I liked perfectly well and enjoyed painting with them, or found them useful; a perfectly pleasant reaction. Some I simply could take or leave, while others I found slightly annoying.

This was not an entirely fair test because, as I noted, some paints work better than others for this particular exercise.

Dark-valued transparent colors such as Quin Gold, Pyrrol Rubin, Quin Fuchsia, Perylene Violet, Prussian Blue, and Indigo emerged as stars in a limited palette because of their ability to create strong value contrast without adding a black or another dark paint.
Secondary and earth colors tended to annoy me, even when I typically like them in a larger palette, such as Transparent Red Oxide and Phthalo Green. They are useful for many situations (e.g. mixing browns or painting vibrant foliage), but not useful enough to take the slot of a primary color.
I painted wet, when I normally use dry pans in sketching, which meant I was more easily able to overlook the faults of weak tinting strength or odd dry consistency. If I only painted wet, I’d use MANS all the time, but sometimes it literally falls out of the dry palette because it crumbles and flakes out.

Still, even within this unusual situation, I felt I was able to confirm some subjective reactions that help me to zero in on the paints I prefer more or less. There are just some paints that I always like when they come up, and others that I always find a little “meh.”

It’s especially easy to sort out my subjective reactions when they don’t align with usefulness: when I like a paint in spite of not finding it useful, like DV Raw Sienna, or dislike it in spite of acknowledging it is useful, like Ultramarine Blue or Perylene Maroon.

Still, for the purposes of putting together a palette, it’s ideal when usefulness and subjective liking align.

What I’d do differently next time

I’m ready to move on for now, but if I do this or a similar exercise again, here’s how I would consider tweaking it.

Bonus Color

As I mentioned on a couple of days, I found that attempting to “round up” secondary and earth colors into a red, yellow, or blue slot generally tended to annoy me. I dreaded being saddled with something like Transparent Red Oxide even though this is a “yes!” paint normally because it was hard to use as a red and robbed me of another red. I might consider dividing my paints into four categories – red, yellow, blue, and bonus – and choosing one of each for each day.

Choose the reference first

I got this exercise from Katie Woodward’s “Mystery Palette Monday”, which she does on hard mode: she not only “rounds up” her secondary colors to a primary slot but also chooses the reference first. I found this baffling and so when I did this exercise I chose the reference after the triad. This allows me to choose a reference that showcases the colors in the triad and show the triad to its best advantage.

Over the course of this project, I found that by choosing the reference after triad, I sidestep a lot of the unusual color choices and improvising that Katie has to do. Some of my friends doing Triadvent or similar exercises reporting having to accept that they won’t be able to match the color of the reference exactly, a lesson that I have yet to learn. I think choosing the reference first makes this a fundamentally a different exercise, and while both have value and I don’t regret doing it this way, I would also like to try it teh other way.