My pigment notebook has a page for every tube I've ever used and it's getting embarrassing
I keep a small notebook where I log every pigment I've ever bought: the manufacturer, the series number, the lightfastness rating, the date I first mixed it, and a brush swipe of the color once it's dried. Forty-seven pages now, and this afternoon I counted. I have eleven different blues.
That's not a confession of extravagance. Eleven blues each do a genuinely different thing, and I can defend every single one of them. But then I flipped to the greens and realized I own six viridian-adjacent tubes that are, if I'm being honest with myself, within a hair of each other on the page. One of them I bought because the shop had it in a display tray and the label was printed in a serif typeface I liked.
I teach a class every spring, and I tell my students the first week that you need exactly three yellows, two reds, and two blues, and everything else is laziness or vanity. I believe that, too. It's just that I am apparently a very good student and a very poor practitioner of my own advice. The serif typeface got me.
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The eleven blues I get. Defending every one of them is practically the job description, I've done the same argument myself, more times than I want to count. There's a difference between a cadmium blue and a cerulean and that difference matters, even if it's subtle, even if only you and maybe three other people could tell them apart in a blind test.
But the viridian pile, the near-twins, that's where the notebook stops being a record and starts being a diary. I'd ask yourself whether you're buying paint or buying the possibility of a painting. I've caught myself doing the second one more than once. It's a form of hope, I think, and not a useless one, but it's not the same as working.
Forty-seven pages, though. You've got discipline. Most people's notebooks are about four pages and one lost tube of flake white. I'd keep counting.
okay first of all eleven blues is not embarrassing, it's a personality trait and I respect it. but the "buying the possibility of a painting" line hit me so hard I had to put my brush down for a second 😭
I did the same thing with gouache last year. I bought this warm yellow I already basically owned because I convinced myself the undertone was "different enough" and then I looked at my shelf and realized I'd just been collecting little tubes of hope. like the painting doesn't exist yet, but if I own the right color, it's closer to existing?? I get it. I get it so much.
but also, hear me out. six viridian-adjacent tubes is not a mistake, it's research. you're not hoarding, you're building a reference library of what green can do. that's what notebooks like that are FOR. the day you're staring at a landscape and need THAT specific sickly green at 3am, you'll be so glad past-you was a little unhinged about it.
do the six of them actually swatch differently next to each other though? that's my only real question. because mine did, barely, and that barely kept me honest.
You and I both read that line and felt it, and I'm not sure whether to be relieved or alarmed that it's catching. I do think there's something real in it, though. The painting on the page is a finished thing, but the painting in your head is made partly of the materials you own. Every tube is a small promise that the idea is still there, waiting. It's not entirely irrational, even if the shelf gets crowded.
The warm yellow story is familiar in a way that makes me slightly uncomfortable. I have a raw sienna that I have repurchased three times in slightly different formulations because each time I convinced myself the granulation was different. It is not meaningfully different. Undertones are a siren song.
But here is the thing I've come to believe, and you can tell me if this is copium: the collecting does feed the work, just not the way we tell ourselves it will. When the right painting finally does come, you reach for that yellow and it's exactly what you meant, and the whole shelf of near-misses suddenly justifies itself. Not all of them. Some of them are just duplicates. But the good ones earn their place retroactively.
So I'll hear you out. What were you going to say?
You've caught me on the buying-the-possibility point, and I don't fully like being caught. I can make a technical argument for each of the six viridian-adjacent tubes, but the honest answer is that two of them were bought in a particular mood, on a particular afternoon, when I was chasing a green I'd seen in a Sargent watercolor and thought the right tube would hand it to me. It didn't, of course. The green I wanted came from layering, not from the tube.
The blues I will still defend to the wall. But I think you're right that once the notebook turns into a record of what I hoped a color would do, I should probably stop and go paint a sitter for a week before I let myself near a shop.