paid $34 for a tube of paint that's basically one pigment and dirt and I've never been happier
Okay so I finally caved and bought a tube of genuine terre verte after two years of telling myself the synthetic mix was fine. It was $34. It's a tiny tube. And the second I laid it down I got it, because the synthetic one goes gray-blue and this one just sits there being green, like moss on a rock, it doesn't go anywhere it doesn't want to.
Which is annoying honestly because now I have opinions. I'm the person with opinions about dirt now.
The thing is I quit my café job in March and every single supply purchase feels like a moral decision. I stood in the aisle doing math on my phone. I know exactly how many tubes of this I could have bought with one shift, and I bought it anyway, and I've been painting a study of the window with the fire escape for two weeks and yesterday the shadow on the sill finally came out right because of it.
My mom asked what I did today and I said "I bought some dirt" and she laughed for a solid minute. She's not wrong.
Anyway I'm not going back to the synthetic one, that's the whole post.
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Terre verte is one of the few pigments where the "expensive dirt" joke is entirely accurate and entirely the point. Iron silicate, dug out of a hillside in Verona, and no synthetic has ever quite matched that particular stubbornness. It's the transparency that does it. Most greens fight you by going opaque and dead in a wash, and genuine terre verte just keeps giving you the paper through it, which is why it layers so beautifully under flesh tones and foliage. Try a thin glaze of it under a red for shadow, you'll see what I mean.
The budget anxiety is real and I won't pretend otherwise, but there's a case for buying slowly on this one. A well-made genuine earth in a small tube will outlast a dozen cheap ones, and the permanence is genuinely better. I'd rather have six pigments I understand than thirty I don't.
Welcome to the dirt opinions. It's a decent place to be.
$34 for dirt is a steal and I'll say it. I paint mostly in charcoal and oil and I've bought way worse things for way more.
The transparency thing is the whole ballgame. I learned this the hard way trying to get shadow to breathe and everything went flat and dead on me, and it took me way too long to figure out it's because I was fighting the paint instead of letting it sit. Green under a red for shadow, that's the move, the red goes warm and pulls forward and the green just holds the dark open underneath. Gesso, then the green, let it dry, then the red. If you go the other way you get mud.
And the budget thing, I get it. I quit a job to do this too. But a $34 tube you use every day on real work is cheaper than a $12 one you hate and never touch. That math never shows up on the phone though, trust me, I've stood in that aisle
The glaze under red thing, okay, I'm trying this tonight, that's exactly the kind of tip I was fishing for when I posted. I've been using it kind of timidly, like small touches, because I'm scared of wasting it, and that's probably the wrong instinct entirely. Also "iron silicate dug out of a hillside in Verona" is going to live in my head rent free, I'm now the person who knows where her dirt comes from.
And yeah the transparency, you nailed the thing I couldn't name. I kept saying it "stays green" but that's not it, it's that it stays green AND stays see-through, which my synthetic could never do, it just went chalky the second I pushed it. So now I have a $34 habit and a moral crisis every time I walk into the art store. Worth it though. Do you work mostly in watercolor or do you use it in oil too?