Christopher G Marson

Suppy List

The following is a suggested but not mandatory (although big brushes are a very good thing) equipment list. 

Watercolour Brushes 

Brushes are 

#12 round synthetic

#8 round synthetic

1.5” Flat synthetic

½“ Flat synthetic

rigger (long skinny round brush for gestural strokes)

Paint

This is a basic and mostly transparent set of colours with a cool and warm variant of each primary I will be explaining the qualities of the various colours as we progress.

Paint should be tube paint. You will need to make juicy washes and it is nearly impossible to do this trying to wet out cake colour.

Colours 

Colours in Bold are my go to indispensables others may or may not get used

If you have your own favourites that’s fine.

Ultramarine Blue

Pthalocyanine (Winsor) blue

Cobalt Blue

Cobalt Tourquoise light

Pthalocyanine (Winsor)  green

Azo yellow 

Cadmium yellow

Yellow Ochre

Burnt Sienna

Cadmium red

Quinacridone Magenta

Ivory black

Titanium white ( designers white, chinese white)

Pthalocyanine (Winsor) blue

Indanthrone blue

Cadmium yellow light

Quinacridone Burnt Orange

Quinacridone red

Terra rosa

Cobalt violet

Quinacridone Gold

Pyroll orange

Quinacridone coral

A site for a great deal of useful information about watercolour

www.handprint .com

Sources for supply

www.endeavoursthinkplay.com art supply store in Fredericton they ship quickly.

www.jerrysartarama.com

www.cheapjoes.com

www.danielsmith.com

www.dickblick.com

You will need a large palette to work on.

A plate or butchers tray will work just fine as long as it is white.

I work on Saunders Waterford rough paper, any decent watercolour paper will be acceptable, Canson, Arches and others cold press or rough are all suitable please do not try to paint on Strathmore paper  which is too heavily sized to allow the paint to work the way it is supposed to.

I will be working on 11” x 15” sheets so anything approximately that size will be ok

Some form of board to fasten your paper to and a tripod or stand to hold while you’re painting on it. 

Refer to my website to see how my setup works. www.christophermarson.com

Two water containers one for cleaning your brush and one for adding clean water to the paint. Plastic is preferable to glass. The bottom half of a plastic water bottle works well. 

I would also recommend paper towels for cleaning your brushes and your pallete.

A small sketch pad, pencil for doing value studies.

Paintings done in various locations in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia

Done on location in watercolour and gouache.

One of the paintings done as a demonstration for the Zoom workshop on acrylic painting that I recently gave.

It is somewhat larger than the paintings I have been doing from home for the last few months. It made it easier for the participants to see what I was doing.

For reference I used a watercolor done on location at the top of Mount Douglas during a walk with friends several years ago.

It was painted on a very smooth prepared panel with the largest brush i could get away with (about an inch and a half in width) I was using Turner Acryl Gouache my current favourite medium and found that the paint just flowed onto the surface. Very enjoyable.

With a lot of assistance from Heidi Cowen our curator at the Dockyard Arts Centre I gave my first Zoom workshop this past weekend.

Apart from a few technical hitches, the modem we were using started to fade and has since been replaced by our ISP and my elderly microphone also gave up the ghost later in the day this also has been replaced with something more modern. We ran the workshop as two sessions one in the morning and then repeated it again in the afternoon in order to keep the class size smaller and more manageable.

I was somewhat nervous about the whole process, but the participants were kind and it all went well.

The project is finished, a daily for the Dockyard Arts Centre everyday for 365 days, it has been an interesting experience, I think I have learned a lot about how to put gouache on panels, and even more about preparing panels, I had plenty of time to experiment.

I highly recommend the process, having a commitment to provide a painting to someone else means that the painting gets done everyday, no excuses, no “I’ll get to it later ” no ” I think I’ll take a break today” just put paint on panel, because sometimes the best paintings happen when you least expect it.

After a while pulling out the equipment after breakfasts becomes a habit and it’s a positive habit. I do believe that this is a good thing.

The habit continues, I just did my daily, but it is not 8×6 and it is probably going to go in my group show with Jonah Jones and Charles Knights. It is however another gouache, habits are hard to break.

The Artcentre have sold a couple of hundred of them and the remaining ones are slowly going up in price as the supply diminishes. This is a fundraiser after all.

You can see the complete collection on www.artbermuda.com and the remaining originals hanging on the wall at the back of the gallery.

I will be posting some of my favourites from the year.

I am still doing my daily every morning, it has become a ritual, eat breakfast go get my pallete box and do a painting.

So far they have all been gouache, I have been trying out different ways of putting it down moving more towards oil technique and less of my natural tendency to do a watercolour when the paint is water thinned.