Paris Grid

Dear all

I hope you are well. I’m having a super productive time in Paris: getting lost (on purpose), writing, filming (for upcoming Meanwhile Art), and, naturally, painting (more on that below).

Thanks so much for sticking with me while I’ve sent a larger-than-usual volume of emails during my print drop. Sale ends tonight at midnight BST!

Visit my print shop

If you have bought a print, thank you very much! I hope it arrives soon and brings you lots of happiness. If you have been thinking about taking the plunge…you have a few hours left to have a look by clicking the button above.

And here is my finished Paris Grid, which I started last week when I shared my tape measure and dice method of selecting colours.

Step-by-step instructions for randomly selecting colours (following on from my video/post last week, 23 July):

1. Get together all the colours you have

2. Lay out your longest ruler or measuring tape and place colours along it (in any order) so that each colour is adjacent to a number

3. Shake whatever dice you have and pick up colours sitting next to numbers corresponding to digits on top of each die. If you have four dice, this first throw will give you four colours.

4. Shake again and this time add the numbers together to make a larger number. Add that colour to the colours selected in step 3.

5. Shake again and multiply pairs of numbers.

6. Repeat and play around with mathematical operations (you’ll need to vary these depending on how many colours annd dice you have) until you have 11 or so colours.

7. Keep the colours in order of selection.

8. Paint a diagonal line of swatches (little freehand blocks), in the received order (step 7), from top left to bottom right. One swatch for each of your dice-selected watercolours. I had my dice choose 11 paints, so my diagonal line is made of 11 swatches. Each one, painted at full saturation (also known as the “masstone” of the paint).

9. Above that diagonal line of swatches, paint swatches of colour blends made by combining the two colours from the diagonal that are in the same row and column as the blend swatch in question (see below).

10. Below the diagonal, just have fun using up the paint on your mixing palette. You might align colours roughly with their pure versions or you might just place colours intuitively, as you please. You could experiment with adding more and less water to explore “undertones” (dilutions) of blends.