Just a quick post from me this week as I have a ton of projects on the go. Just before Christmas, I bought a tiny set of handmade watercolours and ceramic palette from a business called Lilian May, on Etsy. The little ceramic palette fits into its own, beautifully designed, matchbox and the accompanying mixing palette is very cute and surprisingly useful. I’ve been meaning to share this little set on here for a while, so today’s the day!
Lilian May have their own website but I bought the handmade earth pigment watercolor paint set and ceramic palette from their Etsy shop. All their art supplies are handmade in Somerset and are plastic free. It’s a family business and they have great customer service – you can just feel the love for everything they do! They even added a free brush rest to the box as a lovely surprise!
The earth pigment set includes burnt sienna, caput mortuum, yellow ochre and terre verte. The terre verte is a weak colour, which you’d expect from this pigment and I’m not sure it’ll last long, but I’m glad it’s there as it’s such a lovely soft green. The yellow ochre is quite a sunny shade and makes me feel happy when I paint with it. The burnt sienna is a very orange version of the colour that mixes nicely with the terre verte (although you need lots of the terre verte) to make a nice neutral brown. My favourite is the caput mortuum as I love browns that lean towards purple and this is a particularly nice version.
I swatched out the colours and found that they’re a bit sluggish to move around. This isn’t unusual for earth pigments but they certainly aren’t full of the excitement of the highly pigmented Michael Harding paints that I’ve been using recently. As usual with art supplies, whether you’ll like them depends on how you work and the properties you prefer. There are more swatches on Etsy or the Lilian May website and from what I’ve seen so far, their swatches give a really good representation of the colours in the set. I’m planning on using these to colour ink sketches and I think they’ll work well for this.
I used the mini ceramic paint palette to build up a pool of colour before swatching and to mix the colours. For a tiny palette I found it completely adequate for this and I’ve actually found it handy to grab when I need mixing space for other quick ink and watercolour sketches. I’ve really been surprised at how much space there is on the flat surface between the indentations and I find myself using it quite a lot. It’s so pretty it also makes me feel happy when I’m not using it, so all in all it’s a great buy!
I’ll definitely be buying from this business again as they have such a good ethos and beautiful products. Some of their paints are exclusive to the National Gallery Shop and the Courtauld Shop with links to each from the Lilian May website. They have some exciting themed palettes such as the ‘Colours of Monet’ and the ‘J.M.W Turner’ paint sets and anything in the range would make a lovely gift for people who like arty things.
I’ll be popping this set in the car with a small sketchbook, waterbrush and ink pen to see if it comes in handy for 5 minute painting sessions in the car. The weather’s so bad at the moment it’s about as close as I get to plein air sketching right now – roll on spring!
If you’d like a lovely indoor activity this weekend, the Hodgson Loom gallery in Laxey has its opening of the ‘February Eclectic’ exhibition at 2pm-4.30pm tomorrow (Saturday 7th February). I’ll have two pieces being exhibited, one of which is from the IOMNJ map.
I hope to see you there tomorrow if you can make it.
Emma
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