A Lightfast Alizarin

I finally decided to replace my Alizarin Crimson, which is only moderately lightfast (not that I ever really use it by itself in thin layers). I love the Alizarin by Williamsburg (dihydroxyanthraquinone, PR 83) and wanted to give their substitute a chance as I now go with them for all but one of my palette colors, so I tried their Permanent Crimson (anthraquinone, PR 177), which is described as an "absolutely permanent, lightfast substitute for Alizarin Crimson." Very disappointingly, Gamblin's Alizarin Permanent is made from a mixture of quinacridone red b (PV 19), perylene red (PR 149), and ultramarine (PB 29), so I'm not bothering with that. I read recently in at least three places that a truer substitute for the traditional Alizarin or madder hue is pyrrole ruby pigment (PR 264), which can be found in Rembrandt's Permanent Madder Deep (among others), so I got a tube to check it out.

Here I mixed a tint of each one with titanium white. I was afraid a photo would flatten any hue difference between the pigments, but except for the Permanent Crimson which seemed the tiniest bit warmer (this would create slightly less purple purples if you know what I mean), there was little hue difference for the camera to flatten. And all three pigments are strong-staining and have that lovely pinkish undertone. In masstone, however, the substitutes clearly don't match the Alizarin, in center, which is beautifully deep and dark as a thick pile (it almost resembles here a bleeding scab). The substitute Williamsburg, at left, feels flat, with little difference between its masstone and undertone. The Rembrandt pigment, while not an exact match, shows at least some of that Alizarin-like deepening as it gets thicker. Such deepness might not factor much in my normal painting work but it was something I was happy to see, so for this along with its excellent berry-juice-like quality overall, I'm going to try using the Permanent Madder Deep as my Alizarin substitute.

Red onion

6/8. Red onion, oil on linen panel, 7x5 in.

I began to understand just before this painting what the difference between Mars and ivory black is. I never really thought much about black, always treating it as a minor hue (though it's not really a hue) unlike in the limited palettes where it plays a very major role; sometimes I'd use it only for making an already dark color blacker. (Usually when I said "black" I meant Mars, always believing it to be darkest.) Though I say Mars is blacker overall - i.e., it's opaque and stronger - ivory black is actually blacker, i.e., darker. The main difference is that ivory black is semi-transparent. So I thought, with my palette's dark hues being transparent (or semi-), would I generally want to go to a black that is semi-transparent as well?

I assumed mixing a transparent black with already transparent darks wouldn't have any real additive effect. In fact I didn't think about the subtractive effect it would have, i.e., the paint being too oily - as can be seen in the upper background of this painting, which was the result of switching to ivory black for a mix. Putting some Mars black in it towards the bottom made it stronger, but I left it mostly as it was here because it was interesting.

Palette variation

I mentioned the other day a simplified palette that Jeff Markowsky was using in Italy. The following shows an attempt to incorporate such a palette, the result of my own peculiar thought processes.

Robert Gamblin puts palettes in three categories. I find a combination Impressionist/Renaissance palette, or at least my particular variation, appealing. Since learning from Jeff how to use a wide Impressionist spectrum, I've thought a palette should be able to approximate most other colors, hence the idea of a standard palette - I'd rather rely on the same tubed colors every time than get out different tubes for different paintings (and maybe save some money). That's just me.

I kept versatility in mind as my standard colors evolved over the past year. Most recently I added two more to the lineup that are just mixes of existing ones, so that it looked like this:



1. white
2. cad. yellow light
3. ochre
4. Indian yellow
5. cad. red medium
6. alizarin
7. transp. red oxide
8. (transp. red oxide + ultramarine) = blue-brown
9. ultramarine
10. (transp. red oxide + Prussian blue) = blue-green
11. Prussian blue
12. black

The two mixes (8) and (10) are ones I found myself using a lot, so one day I finally made big batches and tubed them. At first I disliked the idea of having a total of 12 colors again, but I came to find here a simple pattern where the odd numbered ones are dominant. And though they're no longer all pure hues, the two mixes seem pure enough (being made of strong-tinting transparent or semi-transparent hues) - and they act as variations of traditional burnt umber and viridian, perhaps.

Within each group of primaries there is a cool and a warm (one opaque and the other transparent or semi-transparent); except in the blues, both of which I suppose are considered warm, Prussian however being cooler. There are also an earth yellow (ochre), an earth red, and a cool dark earth. There's something of a system in it.

The odd-number pattern I thought would help me to simplify a little - e.g. in the very beginning stages of a painting use just (1), (3), (7) and maybe (9), and simple mixes resulting from them (with (8) being one such mix already) - except I tend to get ahead of myself when painting and haven't been able to stick to that plan. Still, the idea was an interesting one.

* * *

Jeff told me of the Florence palette consisting of: white, Naples yellow, ochre, raw sienna, vermillion, cobalt blue, and black - useful for figure painting, but not a color scheme I ever used. I knew I couldn't stick to such a limited palette, but I wondered if I could make it work with my own - that is, not simply add new colors from tubes (only three here are new), but create those colors out of my colors; the new additions would automatically mesh with the larger group this way. So really it wouldn't be about making a different color palette, but an exercise in exploiting the original palette better.

I thought if a paint manufacturer can simulate colors like Naples yellow, then so could I:

Here the numbers are the same as above with emphasis now on the seven-color scheme just mentioned, the only actual new kids on the block being (2a), (4a) and (11a). No great changes took place, except obviously the new colors share space with their counterparts in the original lineup. I used the little space between cad. yellow light(2) and Indian yellow(4) to show how a range of bright middle yellows might exist there (the transparency of Indian yellow makes it so versatile).

A Naples yellow "hue" might be manufactured with white plus some yellow and/or reddish iron oxides, and is easy for me to replicate using ochre (a natural iron oxide) and a touch of transparent red oxide (a synthetic). Raw sienna, another natural iron oxide, can also be approximated with the red oxide and ochre, here with a tiny bit of ultramarine - this is incidentally a mix I occasionally used to use, which could be made to lean slightly towards towards green or red.

Of course these are just my versions and some people might mix them differently. And one might feel there is a sort of blasphemy going on, as you can't really get close to the "true blue" of cobalt using Prussian blue and ultramarine. I remembered the cheap student-grade tubes of cobalt blue "hue" I learned to paint with and how they contain, along with the wax fillers, a mix of white, ultramarine and phthalo blue pigments. My justification for using the slightly weaker Prussian blue for phthalo was in knowing that they are otherwise nearly interchangeable (phthalo having been invented to replace Prussian). And despite the less-than-true-blue quality, this mix (like my "raw sienna") is good because of its strong transparent components. (I'd prefer anyway not to have the bite of true cobalt on my palette, just as I wouldn't want something like a cadmium orange, as beautiful as they are.)

So what did this little exercise show? Just that I could combine two color palettes into one without a great deal of reorganization. I'm not sure yet how much better this will help me to see but it was worth doing.

Mango

2/6. Mango, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in. SOLD

According to the Golden Artist Colors website,

The story of Indian Yellow pigment seems more like myth than fact. In the Bengali province of India, farmers raised herds of cattle fed only on mango leaves and water. The urine from these cows – bright yellow in color – was collected and dried to produce the pigment for Indian Yellow. Unfortunately, the cows were extremely undernourished, as mango leaves did not supply the cattle with sufficient nutrients, and they lived for only a very short time. The process was considered inhumane and, since 1908, Indian Yellow pigment has been prohibited from the market.

Wikipedia says, "In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer's patron remarks that Vermeer used 'cow piss' to paint his wife." Actually, if true, the practice described above would have been inadvisable to begin with, as mango leaves are toxic and cattle in India are sacred. Also from Wikipedia,

In her 2004 book Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay examined whether Indian yellow was really made from cow urine. The only printed source mentioning this practice is a single letter written by a Mr. T.N. Mukharji of Calcutta, who claimed to have seen the color being made. Aside from this letter, there appear to be no written sources from the time period mentioning the production of Indian yellow. Finlay searched for legal records concerning the supposed banning of Indian yellow production in both the India Library in London and the National Library in Calcutta, and found none. She visited the town in India mentioned in Mukharji's letter as the only source of the color, but found no trace of evidence that the color had ever been produced there. None of the locals she spoke with had ever heard of the practice. It is possible that Indian yellow came from another source, and that the cow urine story was fabricated by Mukharji, but came to be accepted by later authors. As such, the viability of producing Indian yellow from the urine of mango-leaf-fed cows is unknown.

Tennis ball

1/22. Tennis ball, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in. SOLD

It always amazes me how a color can seem "off" yet still read as the color you're after. With just the yellows and blues on my palette - cad. yellow med., Indian yellow, ultramarine and Prussian blue - I quickly saw there was no way to match the bright, acidic green of a tennis ball. But of course there wasn't, nor should there be. (Who wants that radioactive glow in a painting?) As I should have learned from the time I tried to match the orange-red of a carrot, painting is a process of translation.

A few of my "failed" yellow-green mixes below, though I didn't think they were very bright, proved to be really good matches. Once I got the color out of the way, this became simply an exercise in rendering a sphere.

Clementine #2

12/15. Clementine #2, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in.

I've been using Indian yellow to punch up the yellows and oranges a little. I suppose using cad. red light or cad. orange might get similar results, but the subtler transparence of Indian yellow is much nicer than the overly intense blaze you get from an opaque cadmium. And although you can make a decent orange by combining cads. yellow and red together, they are never intense enough - the reason being that opaque colors only call attention to the amount of paint that's there, while transparency keeps the focus on the hue and the light, at least giving the effect of more intensity (if not actually increasing it). So I've found that by throwing some Indian yellow in the mix I can reduce the use of cadmiums quite a bit, and get a clean color that isn't too hot.

Gold potato

11/23: Gold potato, oil on linen panel, 5x4 in. SOLD

I'm back from my first somewhat extended blog break. Sorry for leaving abruptly. I hope all my U.S. friends had a great Thanksgiving and were able to get stuffed full of turkey or ham, mashed potato etc., and possibly a syrup-laden cranberry jelly (my wife makes the real thing but we like the canned stuff also). I had had the task of clearing off the mountain range of clutter from the table in the dining room - my "studio" - and I don't know when I would have got it done if the holiday hadn't rolled around. Now I can get started making a fresh mound of clutter.... Yesterday I got up super early and braved the crowd for the first time to hunt down a new vacuum cleaner among other things - I only went to one store so it wasn't too bad, but I wouldn't want to do it again any time soon as I was all messed up the rest of the day.

I also got some Indian yellow yesterday to try for the first time, after seeing too many other painters use it in their standard palettes. Only a tiny bit if any made it into this painting, which maybe shows that I don't really need it, but I've begun to see how having a transparent yellow might be useful.

Kiwi #2

11/17: Kiwi #2, oil on canvas panel, 4x4 in.

As I was going to shoot this I saw there was a lot of light bouncing back from some dull spots in the darkest shadow (this isn't the smooth linen so it was more pronounced). I don't normally do it but I sprayed a little Damar varnish to smooth it out some. I figure this doesn't hurt if the paint layer is still wet, as the Damar would mix in with it and not just sit on top trapping the paint and drying at a different rate. It took care of that dullness but I must have done one spritz too many because it began to liquefy and fan out some of the topmost strokes, like the purplish bits. But oh well, it probably turned out better.

Here's my "standard" palette, which lately hasn't changed much, a sign that I am getting more comfortable - I scraped a lot of the mess away from last night but left the mixed blobs, which I drew out a bit more to show the colors better:

1. titanium white
2. cad. yellow med.
3. yellow ochre
4. cad. red med.
5. alizarin
6. transp. oxide (or earth) red
7. ultramarine
8. Prussian blue
9. ivory black

Alizarin is usually used just for purples and reds, and black practically never (except lately I use it with ochre and maybe a little cad. red if I want a greenish-brown underpainting) - so probably 8 of the 9 colors are actually in the final picture. The one most used is transp. oxide red/red earth, which I learned about from Terry Miura's website - it's like a transparent Venetian red as Gamblin describes, and I've been making my two most important mixes with it: (a) with ultramarine for a transparent dark blue-brown; and (b) with Prussian blue for a semitransparent dark blue-green. (b1) and (b2) are simply (b) mixed with ochre and white, respectively.

These were useful for the kiwis and aren't standard but could be: (c) is yellow ochre added to (a), maybe with more of the red earth. I haven't been mixing it much before last night, but I found it works well for the kiwi skin and would probably be of good use every day. (d) is ochre and red earth. (e) is red earth and cad. yellow.

Sorry if this was confusing. For mediums I'm using Galkyd Lite and/or linseed oil, sometimes Venetian turpentine (tiny glob to the left of the palette cups). I keep telling myself I should go back to using cups with lids, but it may be better to let any remaining bit of Galkyd dry out completely and pour a fresh little amount the next day, than let it dry slowly under cover, creating a gummy mess inside; the linseed oil doesn't really get a chance to dry out.

Carrots

11/15: Carrots, oil on linen panel, 4x5 in. SOLD

I didn't want to use a cad. red or orange to expand my palette, so the color wasn't exactly right. But painting isn't about matching it perfectly, and within the range of my everyday palette it's close enough. (Here the camera flattened a couple shots of red at the carrot tops.) The real hard thing though was just trying to get the local color shifts and light on the forms. I don't blame the small size, as even in a quarter-inch space or less one should be able to get a full range of values and hues.

Old English word of the day:

wealhmore [wĕəl(KH)'-môr-ə]: carrot? Literally, a foreign (Welsh?) root.

From more, "an (edible) root, carrot, parsnip." The word "carrot" didn't appear in English until the 16th century and it's generally agreed that before then a carrot (in Anglo-Saxon England) was something wilder, smaller, and white, yellow, or purplish red; the orange color would be developed in Europe. On the question of the name, here I am gratefully summarizing part of a summary of info on this very topic once posted kindly by another gentleman (it's hard to find answers to these sorts of things sometimes!). The Old English word apparently could have been applied to any root vegetable, and the term wealh- or Wylisc [wül'-ĭsh] more might have been used for "carrot" while an Englisc more was a parsnip. The site Regia Anglorum also mentions this, though reversing the Welsh/English bit. Very confusing!

Kiwi

11/12: Kiwi, oil on linen panel, 4x5 in.

I really love this green, really a blue-green before adding ochre. I can't get over its mystery, for lack of a better word. It truly still feels like alchemy: add a little white to it and it is like water, with yellow it is like a forest, somewhere in the middle it is the mist between land and sea. Some time I'd like to do longer pieces in which I can examine these effects more, not around a kiwi fruit.

Small log #3

11/1: Small log #3, oil on canvas panel, 3.5x7 in.

I could paint this thing a hundred times from different views, but I won't. Here it feels almost like a small dog (some proportions were altered). At last I'm beginning to have a better understanding of my neutrals and can probably begin to push the grey-brown range more in the future, without compromising the strength of the other colors - which has been less than intuitive for me for some reason. This ended up going beyond two hours.

I thought I'd share here the mountain of paint blobs that has been accumulating at my easel. Made of palette scrapings, runaway brush hairs and the occasional flying insect that's fatally attracted to my paintings, it grows with every swipe of my glass scraper. Perhaps growing slower nowadays as I try to let less paint go to waste (it's good when the scrapings are mostly thin and wet and not big dried globs). It started with an old sock used for soaking up turps or oil, but thoroughly dry - i.e., not a combustion hazard, as everything dries flat before ever being folded up in this way. Watch the folds!! Don't let an oily cloth sit crumpled in a way that its heat gets trapped. I've seen, a long long time ago, one of my rags smoking as it sat in a bag of trash, maybe not remembering what I'd heard Marshall Arisman tell of the fire that wiped out his studio when he was younger (but he used/uses really oily rags). So make sure wet rags are lying flat before leaving the room for any length of time - it won't take long for a fire.

But, anyway, this is a thing my wife will point to saying, "That's nasty":

Small log / a Middle English poem

10/30: Small log, oil on canvas panel, 3.5x7 in.

I found this perfect little log and had to do something with it. There was a lot of dragging of paint in the beginning because I started when the underpainting was still a bit sticky, but I liked that. It was about an hour and a half, and overall it feels good to me.

Old English word of the day:

wudu [wŭd'-ŭ]: wood.

I wish some of my previous pieces were this loose, and I like the colors a lot. I'm starting to really like the blue-green that comes from lightening the weird Prussian blue/oxide red mix, as it has a watery and almost mystical feel to it. This makes me think of a fish in water, which brought to mind this Middle English poem I'd read:

Foweles in þe frith,
   þe fisses in þe flod,
   and I mon waxe wod.
Mulch sorw I walke with
   for beste of bon and blod.

Birds in the forest,
   fishes in the sea,
   and I must grow mad.
Much sorrow I walk with
   for best of bone and blood.

This is an ambiguous but incredible little poem, very personal no matter what genre you believe it belongs to. I don't know anything really about Middle English so I'm unable to elaborate on the large amount of material already written about it. Leaving aside the expert discussions I've found on rhyme, rhythm etc., and how it all comes together to create such emotional impact in a few lines, here is what I've digested.

The shift from a picture of harmony in the world to something personally troubling comes on the word wod - which if it means "wood" could continue the pattern of the first two lines, but which in this context apparently means "mad." I assume that these two meanings of wod were pronounced differently (either with a short or long vowel, none of which are ever indicated), so if there is a play on words it is a subtler one. But the real ambiguity of the poem lies in what was originally meant by beste, and therefore the source of the sorrow:

(1) To be a "beast" of bone and blood means to experience sorrow like the aforementioned animals of the sea and sky, as creatures of flesh; or perhaps the sorrow comes from simply being alive after original sin (everything being written in a Christian context).
(2) Or, being human, the "best" of bone and blood, means ironically to be the creature capable of actually knowing sorrow (and becoming mad), separate from the rest of nature. There would be no sorrow if he were a fish in the sea.
(3) It has also been suggested that this is just one of a large number of religious poems, the "best" signifying Christ - because Christ suffered, the poet sorrows; and in addition to carrying the weight of original sin, the poet knows what is expected of him in this life. Furthermore, this could be an echo of a verse in Matthew and Luke: "the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head."
(4) Perhaps the most widely held belief is that this poem is of the courtly love tradition and that the "best of bone and blood" is simply the woman for whom the poet yearns.

It's for every reader to decide, but I prefer (2) or perhaps (3).

Work in progress

10/20.

I used some more neutrals, mainly some greys and a light warm brown-ochre sort of color, which I had been doing for a while but for some reason hadn't used lately. I took this photo more as a reminder to myself, as I have so many blobs of paint "saved" on my easel that I no longer know what's what. It's beginning to come together and I can see the end of the tunnel from this point. Loosening up a little has helped a lot, and I'd be happy with even more impressionistic color dabs. (I don't know where the background is headed; some of it was just an attempt at more sprezzatura or something.)

Work in progress / Color chart: purples

10/16.

Showing something in progress is like having a crowd watch me walk a tightrope (I don't like crowds much). With no one around it's a simpler matter of getting from A to B, and what might happen in between is my business.... So here I am inching along. Another hour and a half or so, but it didn't really shape up as much as it could have. I thought the other day that I was getting sick, but now it seems I'm just in one of those funks when I can't focus on what's in front of me (the kind that used to be much darker and lasted very long times). Or maybe I need to get a really good night's sleep.

Thinking about being sick only reminded me of the great ones who died so young, through no fault of their own, yet were able to create such great work. That's to say I don't mean Janis Joplin types who drank and drugged themselves to death. But those like the poet Keats who died at 25, and especially my painting hero Richard Parkes Bonington who died at the same age, only a month shy of his next birthday - both from tuberculosis. I know I haven't made the most of my time on earth, but I am grateful to be alive.

I left this piece at the point where I began to add the purple in the leaf at right, and then did a chart of purples:

Color chart: greens

10/3: To the 4 or 5 readers I have left: this might seem like a cop-out, I know, but the amazement I felt on the previous night came back once I showed Dorothe some of the subtle color mixes I'd stumbled upon recently. I should have done some actual painting and not obsessed about colors, but I can see myself putting this off indefinitely; I felt it was important to do before I decide to switch to different colors. This chart doesn't deal with any triads of subtle greys etc., but the greens from my two yellows, two blues, and black (I found my tube of Mars black but the difference between it and the ivory black was almost impossible for me to discern, so this is the ivory - supposedly the cooler one). It photographed pretty accurately, albeit dark, except that the pure ultramarine has a freaky electric glow here.

TOR=transparent oxide red
PB=Prussian blue
UB=ultramarine blue
Blk=ivory black

The swatch with the asterisk is the dark woody green I wrote about yesterday (see below), and the second row is the range made using it - so actually making triads, with each yellow. In the upper right between TOR and UB is my darkest shadow mix, and you can sort of see the inky browns that they make.

TOR is similar to burnt sienna, but because of its transparency will mix differently with other colors. See here, at top, pure burnt sienna on the left and TOR on the right. Mixed with ochre, just below, they are nearly the same - though the TOR mix is more golden and not weighed down. At bottom is Prussian blue; with sienna it makes a nutty dark brown, which is nice but can be found other ways, while with TOR it somehow turns that incredible green, a new color with new possibilities.

The green does resemble Hooker's green, and I feel dumb now that I've looked it up: Hooker's is just a mix of Prussian blue and gamboge yellow. I wonder now though about Prussian being fugitive, and whether I should use phthalo.

Egg sketch #7

10/2: Egg sketch #7, oil on canvas panel, approx. 3x5 in.

I've been real lazy, didn't paint till late. Recently someone suggested I do a video of one of these sketches, and I had everything set up and would have one to share, except for much of it I stood too much to one side partly blocking the camera's view. And when I wasn't it was just painful to see how much noodling and redundant brushwork I was doing on such a little "sketch." (It's very weird watching myself paint.) But next time will go better.

So I took a break from the self-portrait, and I'm glad I did because I came to the realization that cerulean blue is no good. I used Prussian blue again (which had been on a corner of my palette for some time now) and came to discover more of its amazing properties. Cerulean is not for me any more - and it never was, honestly ... it should be kept to plein air painting. I had always disliked Prussian blue because it was so strong, like a phthalo, and it liked to find its way onto my skin all the time and spread to my clothes. But I made a great discovery while thinking about greens, and which one I might use out of the tube:

I mixed as usual my darkest dark shade (a, above): transp. oxide red and ultramarine blue, the result of which had amazed me the first time I mixed them. Then I thought I'd try the oxide red with Prussian blue, and the wonderful dark green that it made (b) just blew my mind. I don't know which green it resembles - not sap green but Hooker's? I don't know, I didn't look it up. Of course Prussian blue is greenish, and that's why it looks like light underwater and why real nice blue-greens and green-greys are possible (c), from varying the ratio of it to white and ochre. But who would know, until they try it, that this "blue" plus a "red"-brown would give the most incredible green? It is like moss and earth and ferns and all that is good about the woods, all at once.... Some of this dark green is visible in the bottom part of the painting. But the possibility of a wider range of grey as well as green is what is most remarkable; I still have a lot to learn to really exploit this. I used to wonder why people used Prussian blue so much, and now I can understand.

Work in progress: Self-portrait

9/30: Self-portrait, oil on canvas panel, approx. 8x6 in.

Lest this blog become just a series of tiny 20-minute sketches, I thought I’d better do something more involved. This time I wanted to do a more finished self-portrait. I can’t guarantee that it won’t end up an embarrassing mess, so here is what it looks like now. I think it is the beginning of a decent portrait, at least beginning to look like me – keeping in mind the fundamental structural concepts such as forming the sockets before eyeballs, I tried to address some crucial things before stopping: eyes going in the right direction (sounds simple enough), the corners of the mouth, and (in my case) looking like a member of the Taliban. Well, it’s on its way.

This is only an hour and a half of work so far and I tried to stay rough. The palette is typical for me nowadays: white, yellow, ochre, red, alizarin, transp. oxide red, burnt umber, cerulean, ultramarine, black. I should keep cad. red light off my palette and use it only in special cases (it’s not like I can't use the other colors to make everything way too hot); same with my old friend burnt sienna, as the oxide red pretty much replaces it. I might add terre verte or a similar green, if mainly as a way to remember to use greens more, but it still leaves the total number above 10, when painters like Nerdrum can work with 3 or 4.... I may well end up doing more of a dabby type of Nerdrumesque modeling here, thinking that I possibly relate to his style more than I thought. We'll see how it goes.

Cherry tomatoes

9/7: Cherry tomatoes, oil on canvas panel, approx. 3x5 in. NFS

I got to thinking again about simplifying my colors, so I scraped off a few "in-betweens" that had been hanging out at the top of my palette too long, and rethought the overall arrangement. Not the simplest palette, but I'm proud I can keep within a dozen colors (how can I say good-bye to burnt sienna and cad. red light?). Here's my still-evolving evolving palette as of this painting:

From left:

flake white hue (I started playing with it recently; W&N) and titanium white (*)

cad. yellow medium (Gamblin)

yellow ocher (Williamsburg)

cad. red light (*)

cad. red medium (Gamblin)

alizarin crimson (*)

transp. oxide red (Rembrandt)

burnt sienna (Grumbacher)

burnt umber (Williamsburg)

cerulean blue (Gamblin)

ultramarine blue (*)

ivory black (W&N)

The greens are mixes, generally of yellow and ultramarine, so they begin life down in the main mixing area next to my mixed browns - which feels perfect to me, as in the natural world greens and browns are usually found together. I used to have a tube green up top, but found it unnecessary most times. The brown mess in the middle is my general coffee-mud made up of ocher, transp. oxide red and burnt umber, and lately has been the color I start laying out with.

The palette itself is a glass piece that I've had since school, and which has a manila folder on the backside right now. It used to have brown paper taped to the back to mix my colors against, but I realized it made little sense when I didn't always start my paintings with middle- to dark-value brownish grounds. In one of the tin cups is a 1:1:1 mix of stand oil, turpentine and damar, which has been pretty comfortable for me but I'd like to experiment more.

*Brands I'd rather not name. The other brands aren't all my preferred ones, but may have been influenced by what money I had.

Pink Pearl

8:27: Pink Pearl, oil on canvas panel, approx. 6x4 in.

Same brown mix as yesterday but thinner: transp. red oxide, burnt umber and black, with ocher in the lighter parts and more black in the darks. I guess the red oxide/oxide red does here what burnt sienna usually does for me, except it's transparent. I'll have to play around with this further.

Old English word of the day:

brún [brūn]: brown, dusky, dark.

It is interesting that in the old form of our language the terms for colors dealt more with the brightness of a thing than its hue. Not until Middle English (c. 12th century) did color names begin to refer to hues specifically. Here is a good discussion which touches on this and other things that made Old English super.