Paint

When I paint I typically use about ten different colors; Cadmium Lemon, Cadmium Yellow light, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine Deep, Viridian and Titanium White. If you’re not an artist this is just snobby artist speak for some variations of yellow, red, blue and green colors and white. I rarely use these colors straight from the tube and find that when mixed together they give me most of the color I need to paint the subjects I’m interested in. Although a tube of “California Sky on an Overcast Day in September at 9 a.m. ” might be a nice addition but I haven’t seen it in any of the local art stores. Let me know if you have.

When I paint outside I do add one color to my palette and that’s cerulean blue, which is a warm blue. It helps me when I’m mixing a color for the sky on a bright day or some of the ocean water mixtures.

Here’s a photo of my box of paints. There’s about 25-30 tubes of paint piled up in there but I only use about half of them…the rest are really souvenirs from trips to the art store wanting to try a new or different pigment. I’ll often decide later that they have no practical use for me and those tubes eventually find themselves at the bottom of the box.

I just noticed in this photo that you can see two tubes of Alizarin Crimson next to each other; one almost empty and one half used. This is typical of me, using paint from a new tube when I haven’t completely emptied out the first. I’m not sure why I do this, although it seems to be consistent with other things in my life. I have a stack of books by my bedside that I’ve only read parts of. I just find the parts I’m interested in, read those parts, then pick up another book.

A more simple explanation is that I just like the feel of pushing out the paint in a new tube. It’s like squeezing out toothpaste from a new tube of Crest. There’s just something satisfying about it.