My 11 year old told me my sky was "the wrong kind of blue" and I think she's right
I had about 40 minutes after bedtime to get the sky in on this field piece and I mixed what I always mix, ultramarine and a touch of white, that cold early-spring blue. She wandered out for water, looked over my shoulder, and said it looked like the sky in a cartoon.
Then she went to bed. So that was helpful.
The annoying part is she's not wrong. I've been using the same blue mix for years because it works and I don't have to think about it, and now I can't unsee it. It's flat. It reads like a color I chose instead of a color that was there.
So now I'm going down the rabbit hole of warm blues and I'm realizing how much of my palette is just habit. Same three mixes over and over. I've got a tube of cerulean I bought in like 2019 that I've barely touched because it felt "too pretty."
Not sure what I'll land on but the sky is going to be worse before it gets better.
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kids are savage critics because they've no manners about it yet. mine told me a hare I'd spent two days on looked like a dog, and the worst part is she was half right, the ears were all wrong.
but you're onto the real thing here, the mix that "works" is usually just the mix you stopped looking at. the flatness isn't in the blue itself, it's that you're not seeing it anymore. I've a box of linocuts from years back where I used the same black mix every time and I can spot the exact stretch where I got comfortable, the whole thing goes dead. not wrong, just asleep.
the one thing I'd say is don't chase the perfect blue too hard either. half the time a colour reads as "there" because of what's beside it, not because of the colour. your cold spring blue might come alive the second there's a warm grey or a bit of ochre in the field underneath it. worth a proof before you rebuild the whole palette.
The linocut box is the honest part. Everyone keeps the work that shows the rut, nobody frames it.
I'd push back a little on one thing though. The mix isn't always asleep because you stopped looking at it. Sometimes it's asleep because it's the right mix for one hour of the day and you're using it at another. Ultramarine and white is a fine blue at seven in the morning in March. At five in the afternoon it's a lie, and no amount of looking harder fixes it, you have to change the blue. Forty minutes before bed is exactly when you reach for the saved mix, so I don't think your problem was attention. I think it was the clock.
The ears on the hare, though. Two days and you didn't see it. That one's attention.
Okay, the seven in the morning versus five in the afternoon thing just rearranged something in my head. Because you're right, I mixed that blue in my twenties and I've been airlifting it into every painting since, and half of them are evening scenes. So it's not that I stopped seeing, it's that I've been using a March morning blue on October afternoons and then wondering why it looks like a cartoon.
Forty minutes before bed is exactly it too. That's not painting time, that's assembly time. I'm reaching for the mix the way I reach for the same dinner on a Tuesday.
So what do you do for a late afternoon sky? Because everything I try goes either muddy or candy pink, and I don't know if that's the blue's fault or mine.
"not wrong, just asleep" is going straight in my head, that's such a good way to put it. And the linocut box thing makes me feel better, because at least yours is in a box where you can leave it. Mine is on the easel and I have to look at it every night.
The hare/dog thing made me laugh, sorry. Two days on the ears and she clocks them in one second. I keep telling myself it's a good eye, not a mean one, but at 10pm it doesn't feel that way.
You said the one thing you'd say is don't... and then it cut off? I want the rest of it. Was it don't overcorrect and go muddy, or don't buy a whole new blue set? Because I'm already halfway through a cart on one of those sites, so you may be saving me money here.