February 1, 2024

Varying Your Viewfinder with Jill Richie

Play with composition and a limited palette.

By The Art Toolkit Team

Someone holds up a grid of gold, green, and blue forest sketches in front of a forest.

This is a live recording from our Varying Your Viewfinder demo with artist Jill Richie from January 31st, 2024. In this demo, Jill guided viewers through exploring composition using a limited color palette and expressive mark marking. Jill shares how to create four different wintery landscapes using a single photo for reference. She covered techniques for you to bring on your sketching adventures, including how to hone in on areas of interest, zoom in on a picture, and interpret different views through your own creative lens!

Two hands hold a paint-filled palette and waterbrush, sketching a glacier overlooking a glacier.
Mendenhall sketch by Jill Richie.
A person holds up a tryptic of a snowy scene of trees and a big mountain, with the scene behind.
Miller sketch by Jill Richie.
A Folio Palette with many watercolor-filled pans, each labeled with the name of the color.
Jill'‘s Folio Palette. Top row: Cobalt Teal Blue, Cobalt Turquoise, Cerulean Blue Chromium, French Ultramarine, Phthalo Blue (Green Shade), Indanthrone Blue, Indigo, Sap Green, Cascade Green, Phthalo Green, Lunar Earth; middle row: Pyrrol Scarlet, Deep Scarlet, Quinacridone Rose, Quinacridone Gold, Burnt Umber, Payne’s Grey, Lamp Black, Neutral Tint, Quinacridone Purple; bottom row: White Gouache, Gamboge.
A color printout of a mountain scene with a pink sky and blue mountains shows 4 crop rectangles. A finished watercolor from each of the four crops sits beside, and a Folio Palette filled with watercolors is below.
Jill’s crop notes and tools.
A hand holds up four watercolor mountain scenes in front of a bright blue sky and snowy trees.
Finished watercolors.

About Jill

Jill Richie is an Alaskan artist whose practice is shaped by human interaction with the environment in her home state.

A person, bundled in a hat and hood, smiles at the camera with snow in their eyelashes.
Jill in the snow.
An open toolkit, palette and watercolor painting lay in the snow by skis.
Art supplies suited for skiing!

From the backyard to the backcountry, she uses art as a tool for observation, recreation, and environmental and social advocacy.

All images courtesy of Jill.
An artist sites on a rock, dipping a paintbrush in a Pocket Palette.

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