Palette — Color Studies & Process

I've been painting watercolor for about as long as I've been underwriting loans — nine years. Coincidence, I think not. Both disciplines require the same muscle: the willingness to let something imperfect sit there while you figure out the next layer.

My studio is the back room of my house in Rexburg. It has one north-facing window, a cheap folding easel, and three boxes of paper in various states of staining. The mountains are always there if I look up. That's enough.

Studies in Color

The Idaho Palette

Living in Rexburg means painting the same colors over and over, because they change every time. Here are the five core pigments I reach for most often — and the specific quality of Idaho light each one tries to capture:

Yellow Ochre — The Earth

The soil of the Valley of the Sun before the first rain. It's the underpainting for everything — the dry creek beds, the old barn siding, the dust on the dash of your truck in July.

Viridian — The Spruce

The Wasatch Front at dusk. Not green, not blue — the exact moment when conifer turns to shadow and you can't tell which is which. I mix this with a touch of cobalt.

Burnt Sienna — The Canyon Walls

Hells Canyon in October. This is the color of patience — layers of sedimentary rock that took millions of years to form, and I'm trying to capture them in twenty minutes of wet-on-wet.

Ultramarine — The Sky Between

Not the blue you see on a clear day — that's too easy. This is the blue that appears in the gaps between cloud formations, the one that makes you pull your car over on Highway 20.

Raw Umber (washed) — The Morning Light

Almost white, but not. The color of dawn on the Snake River when the mist hasn't lifted. I leave the paper bare in these spots and let the white do the work. Sometimes the bravest thing you can paint is nothing at all.

Process

How I Approach a Painting

My process is slow by design. I work on one piece at a time, usually a 9×12 inch sheet of 140lb cold-pressed paper. Here's how a painting comes to life:

Sketch in pencil. Light lines only — I'm mapping the composition, not committing. The horizon line matters more than anything. Get it wrong and the whole piece floats.
Wet the paper. I spray the entire surface with clean water from a mister bottle. This is where patience pays — wait until the sheen settles. Too wet and the pigment runs; too dry and it blooms.
Lay the sky first. Ultramarine and a touch of raw umber, wet-on-wet. Let it flow. The sky sets the emotional temperature for everything below it. A warm sky feels like forgiveness.
Build the land in layers. Yellow ochre for the base, then viridian for the forests, burnt sienna for the canyons. Each layer must dry before the next — this is the part where I usually go to make tea or re-read a chapter of whatever mystery I'm working through.
Detail with a rigger brush. Trees, fence posts, the little things that say "someone lives here." These are the details that separate a wash from a place.
Walk away. Let the piece dry completely — sometimes overnight — then come back with fresh eyes. Most of my corrections happen in this final pass. The painting tells you what it needs if you listen.

From the Studio

Recent Work

Painting on wooden easel with palette — The Easel — my workspace

Watercolor forest landscape — The Easel — my workspace

I don't sell my paintings. They go to family, to friends, to the credit union's waiting room (my boss approved after the third one). The point isn't commerce — it's attention. The painting demands that I slow down enough to see.

A Note on Failure

My most common mistake is rushing the drying time. You can see it from a mile away: the watercolor blooms into those ugly little starburst patterns where the pigment was still wet when the next layer hit it. I call them "impatience flowers."

I see the same thing in underwriting. People who rush through their financial preparation end up with "impatience flowers" on their applications — errors, omissions, gaps that could have been avoided with an extra week of patience. The lesson is the same in both: the medium has its own timeline. You don't negotiate with it.