Jenny Dolfen

Shardplate badger for David (and opaque ramblings)

Added 2025-08-16 08:49:22 +0000 UTC

Commission for David, which was an utter joy. I had so much fun with this lil guy!

ShinHan Pass hybrid watercolour/gouache on Canson Montval paper, A4 size. I'm on a mission to get into opaque watercolours. They seem like the best thing that’s currently happening to my way of painting. Handle like watercolours, don't dissolve when you add layers, look creamy and opaque like gouache, but can be used transparently. So really versatile, the best of all worlds!

I plan to experiment more with the idea. The last two decades, I’ve listened to a lot of advice saying that you MUST use transparent watercolours, so I prettty much got rid of all the opaque and even semi-opaque ones.

(Quality watercolours, for those that don't know, have little symbols on the tube or pan that tell you their lightfastness, staining, and opacity grades. Opaque colours usually have a filled-in circle or square. Some pigments are naturally transparent, like Ultramarine, some are always opaque, like Caput Mortuum. Opaque watercolours are opaque enough so that you can theoretically paint light on dark, so just a step below gouache. Fun fact: You can usually tell when a colour is transparent if it looks almost black in your palette. The brighter its colour in the pan or on a dot card, the more opaque it is.

I've got myself a few opaque tubes from Schmincke and Sennelier, and put together a palette with them. They're easier to replace than ShinHan, which aren’t available over here, and are more reliably lightfast. This is my new palette: