This blog is mostly artists notes and other thoughts on the trip. If we go back, its a good review of what I learned, and for anyone wanting to paint there maybe it would help too!
Here is a scan of one of the palettes I brought on our PEI trip, the other one was identical but without the crack and wire holding it together. The picture is blurred a bit since I used the flatbed scanner. This is normally the one I use in winter, which is why it cracks up like that, but in the summer I bring it as a second palette. If you run out of paint, you need to squeeze out fresh paint and let it dry for about a day, so the second palette allows for continual painting. However, I only used one of the palettes on the PEI trip to do 35 paintings, the only colour that ran out on the last day was yellow.
When we went to Brazil last year I regretted not bringing raw sienna, so this time I had a blob of it on the mixing area in the top left. It came in handy, but caput mortuum would have been more useful, its a neutral dark red (PR101) that would have been great to make the shadows of the red cliffs. I came up with an alternative, which was red ochre (fourth from left, top row), with purple (PV55) and dark blue (PB60) which are 6th and 7th on the top row. When dried, the paint blobs tend to look dark, and almost black in some cases. Actually, sometimes I forget which green is which they look so similar when they are dried on the palette. Not much has changed in my palette setup since the last update where I detailed the pigment names and codes.
In PEI, the colours were very soft and neutral, almost pastel-like. Getting those half chroma hues required careful colour mixing, and cutting some of the mixes with yellow ochre (PY43, 1st on top row) helped a lot. Most scenes had a warm glow, while the water brought in a wide range of colours. Bright turquoise was also present on doors of houses, shanties, and in the water sometimes. There is a cobalt turquoise that would have been perfect, but I stopped carrying cobalt pigments awhile ago. To make turquoise I relied on phthalo green (PG7) with phthalo blue (PB15) mixed with just the right amount of water. Perylene green (PG31) was very useful, the pine trees had almost the exact same dark green. Magenta (PR122) and the oranges (PO62, PO73) were useful for pink skies. If you looked carefully, PEI had a wide range of colours, and I think the people who live there also really enjoy having colours in their lives. Hopefully the paintings I did capture the colours and vibes of PEI to some extent.
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