One Color A Day: Testing out a year-long commitment to color with Courtney Cerruti

The first four swatches I made during week five, the first week Cerruti encourages us to think about the weather as we paint.

Short take: Love the idea (a lot); wish the book had been printed on watercolor paper.

Courtney Cerruti’s One Color a Day is a watercolor sketchbook designed to be used daily for one year. The time commitment and instructions are minimal: Cerruti gives a few suggestions at the beginning for how one might use the book—the different options for mixing—and then, for the most part, leaves the user to their task. Mixing one color a day, or swatching two or more colors in a single, circular mark, takes very little time and can be an interesting way to let mood play out on the page. It’s so quick that I’ve managed to do it daily since the birth of my second child, despite sleeplessness, endless breastfeeding, and my very energetic three-year-old. 

As I said above, I love this idea. But a problem in its realization made itself known as soon as I started using the book: the paper. It appears to be thick printer paper, rather than a paper made specifically for use with water-based media. 

For a book designed to be used every day for a year, this might be a deal-breaker. If achieving swatches like those on the book’s cover is really important to you, then you may be better off buying a quality sketchbook or watercolor pad and adding the grid yourself, probably at an altered scale (maybe one grid per month?), since most watercolor paper doesn’t come in great enough quantity to accommodate the number of entries (two pages per week) that this book does. There are lots of different watercolor papers out there, but Strathmore Series 400 is a good place to start if you’re just beginning to explore this medium.

The watercolor paints I’ve been using to swatch, from left: My Beam Paints 8-color palette, my custom palette (filled with Winsor & Newton Cotman and Professional watercolors, as well as a few Daniel Smith colors and a couple of samples), and my beloved Art of Soil 25-color palette.

Another solution would be to buy the book and use a different medium, but this would lead to a different result than what is pictured (attractively) on the cover. 

If you would like to go ahead and try the book out (it’s not very expensive), I’ve found that I most enjoyed using my number eight round brush to create the circles, and that I liked the shape I could achieve with my non-dominant hand best. Done with my left hand, the edges of the circles turned out more organic. 

To make the swatches, you can either paint a circle of clear water on the page and then drop in a color (or colors), or you can start with a color and drop in another (or two, or three). I like to work with a color base rather than a water base, since the water base quickly soaked through the page. This wouldn’t happen with a quality watercolor paper, so if you’ve taken the route of replicating Cerruti’s idea in a blank sketchbook, your options for how you make the swatches will be greater. 

My tube watercolors, which I store in an upcycled honey jar to help them keep moist and last longer.

The binder (what holds the paint ingredients together) and status (dried in a pan or not) seems to matter for how much the paint will spread, though even only five weeks in, I’ve found exceptions to this. My Beam Paints watercolors had to be physically prompted (by manipulating the brush) to move around in another (traditional gum-based) watercolor—maybe because they contain maple sap? The paints that moved the most were watercolors out of a tube, which makes sense. They haven’t spent a lot of time already dry in a pan. Daniel Smith watercolors moved immediately when dropped into other paint. 

It’s a fun book. If you have the money to try it out, and think you can tolerate the frustrations caused by the paper, I’d say give it a try. You might also forego buying this pre-setup book and instead set yourself a similar daily task in another medium for a designated time of your choice. For example, it might be just as instructive to draw a simple shape in colored pencil, or mix two different oil pastels on the page, every day for a month. 

These kinds of challenges are great because they keep your hands moving and force you to innovate if you get bored. You might, as a result, try a different way of holding your tool, only work standing up, or try working with your eyes closed. Regardless of what you try, you will be learning about the medium and about what you like. That’s the point, for me. Best of all, you’ll be expressing something that might have otherwise stayed hidden, and doing it in a no-stress, low-stakes way. 

We all need that.