Today’s warmup exercise:

Working with the same colors and previous warmup exercises (Scales, Limber Session), namely yellow ochre, cadmium red light, cobalt blue and the gray resulting from mixing the red and the blue. I tried variegated (meaning,  ‘a variety of colors) washes today. The lesson I followed in the Tate Watercolour Manual, Lessons from the Great Masters by Tony Smibert and Joyce Townsend, directed me to lay down variegated washes first using dry brush and then with the wet-in-wet technique.

Varigated Washes

The panels on the left side of the paper are dry brush washes, leaving white space, as directed; the right-hand set of panels are examples of wet-in-wet washes of the same pigments.

This technique will require some practice to get the correct water-to-pigment ratio for each color, in order to determine (at least approximately) the amount of mixing on paper. One can see on the dry brush side of the chart that colors did not mix together that well. The wet-in-wet panels show better mixing, but even here I would benefit from further study.