Kazuo Kasai is one of my favorite contemporary watercolor artists to follow on Instagram (before I left Instagram), and he has amazing timelapse videos on Youtube. Even accounting for the sped-up video, he paints so fast, slapping down paint as if at random, yet it all comes together. I love his fresh, bold color and the way his paintings are so intensely seasonal: spring bursting with blossoms; summer full of sunlight and greenery; autumn exploding with fall color; and winter cold and serene.
Artist Palette Profiles
Artist Palette Profiles: Emma Lefebvre
Emma Lefebvre is a popular social media watercolor teacher with a cheerful, illustrative style. She specializes in loose florals and cute paintings of food, such as cupcakes. I found her book, Watercolor Lessons, to be a fun, eye-catching intro that raises excitement about watercolor without bogging the reader down with too much technical detail. It would appeal to the beginner who is drawn to simplicity, color, illustration, and a bold, modern aesthetic.
So what colors does Lefebvre recommend?
Artist Palette Profiles: Gordon MacKenzie
Gordon MacKenzie is a northern Ontario artist known for his The Watercolorists’ Essential Notebook series of books. A self-taught author who has spent a lot of time teaching, his books are adapted from his class materials and several of the pages do feel like handouts you might get in class.
Artist Palette Profile: Nathan Fowkes
I waited a long time to get Nathan Fowkes’ How to Paint Landscapes Quickly and Beautifully in Watercolor and Gouache from interlibrary loan. I’m not sure how I first head of it, but the title sounds great: I like quick! I like beautiful! Will I like this book?
Artist Palette Profiles: Max Romey
Max Romey (@trailboundsketches on Instagram) is an Alaska-based field sketcher and videographer known for working outdoors in freezing temperatures, documenting climate change, and creating highly-produced and experimental videos, such as those that interpose him in his own sketches. He also releases inspiring pep talks to creators, and embarks on interesting projects, such as finding the exact spots his grandmother sketched, or leaving tiny paintings around town to inspire moments of delight.
So what’s in his palette?
Artist Palette Profile: Alex Hillkurtz
Alex Hillkurtz is the author Sketching Techniques for Artists, a book covering the basics of sketching with an eye toward plein air. It’s a well-designed book that’s fun to flip through, with each two-page spread covering a topic such as perspective, negative space, the rule of thirds, etc. It’s a bit high-level for a beginner, but it’s useful for review.
While the book mostly covers drawing, there is a section on painting and Hillkurtz shares his six go-to watercolor colors.
Artist Palette Profiles: Jill Gustavis
Jill Gustavis is a watercolor artist from Western Massachusetts. On Instagram, she did a 100 Days project where she painted with different triads, which is definitely interesting to me with my newfound interest in limited palettes. She has some great blog entries; I’ve read her post, Magic Happens When You Repeat Paintings, several times. I don’t usually like repeating paintings, but she makes a great case for exploring, and I love every iteration of her example.
Artist Palette Profiles: Hazel Soan
As a big-palette enthusiast, I really need practice with limited palettes, which is where Hazel Soan’s 2022 book Art of the Limited Palette comes in. In the book, Soan extols the joys of using a limited palette – how it can make your paintings look more color-rich, less muddy, and more harmonious, while also making your life easier as a painter.
What makes this book convincing is how much I love use of color in Soan’s paintings in the book. Is this because she uses limited palettes, or because she’s generally good at painting? Hard to say, but her limited-palette paintings certainly don’t appear to be limited in hue or value. On the contrary, they seem to glow and vibrate with color!
Artist Palette Profiles: Katie Woodward
Katie Woodward (@ramblingsketcher) is a New York City watercolor artist who authored Understanding Light in the Urban Sketchers Handbook series. She also does one of my favorite Instagram video series, Random Palette Mondays, where she draws three random colors (one from a “red” bag, one from a “yellow” bag, and one from a “blue” bag, but interpreted loosely) and paints a pre-selected scene from the resulting triad. It’s a great series because she shows how a wide variety of triads can be used to create unexpected results.
Artist Palette Profiles: Poppy Balser
I recently started a series of classes with Poppy Balser, a celebrated Canadian artist based on the Nova Scotia coast who works in oil and watercolor. Balser uses a very limited palette!