About Wash & Bloom
Wash & Bloom is a working notebook from a watercolour studio. It exists because the useful part of learning watercolour is almost never the finished painting — it is the sheet underneath it: which pigment went down first, at what dilution, onto what paper, and what the water was doing at the moment the brush touched.
What gets published here
Three kinds of entry. Technique entries document a single wash behaviour — a flat wash that dries level, a graded wash from ultramarine into cerulean, a backrun you invited rather than suffered. Mixing entries work through a palette: a limited primary triad, an earth triad for skin, neutral greys built from complements. Study entries are copies after painters whose water handling is worth stealing, followed by the same discipline applied to our own material.
Every entry carries its pigment ratios, the paper weight it was worked on, the water load the sheet was holding, and the order of operations. If a result depended on a specific paper or a specific granulating pigment, that is stated rather than generalised away.
How the colour wheel works
The twelve families on the front page are hue groupings, not a manufacturer's range. They are arranged by hue angle so that moving around the wheel moves through the spectrum the way mixing does: ultramarine toward cobalt and cerulean, then through teal and the greens into the earths, the reds, the violets, and back to neutral greys that were mixed rather than bought.
Selecting a family filters the index beneath it. The filtering happens in the page itself; nothing about which sector you clicked is sent anywhere.
Honesty about results
Watercolour is a material practice. Pigments from different makers share a name and behave differently; paper sizing changes between batches; humidity in the room changes how long a bead stays open. The notes here describe what happened on a particular sheet under particular conditions, and they say so. Treat them as starting points to test, not as guarantees.
Entries that describe copying another artist's work are study exercises for private practice. They reproduce no artwork and claim no rights over any.
How the site is built
Wash & Bloom is a static site. Pages are generated ahead of time and served as files; there is no application server in the reading path and no reader accounts. Colour plates are generated as SVG files from each entry's own pigment list, so a plate cannot drift out of step with the recipe printed beside it.
Entries are released on a schedule rather than all at once, which is why a family can show three published notes today and six more later.