spent $30 on a tube of paint I don't need
Went to the art store for a bottle of matte medium and came out with a tube of phthalo turquoise because it was 40% off and I have zero self control. I don't even paint water. I paint fields and parking lots and the occasional pear.
It's been sitting on my table for a week and I keep picking it up. There's something about a full tube you haven't touched yet. Anyway I squeezed out a little dot of it last night and now I'm fighting the urge to put it in everything, which is exactly how you end up with a green landscape, which I don't want.
Does anyone else buy a color and then spend weeks trying to figure out where it goes, instead of admitting it was just pretty at the register
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Phthalo turquoise is a dangerous one, it takes over everything. I work almost only in blue and I still had to learn to keep it away from anything I want to stay neutral. A dot of it goes so far.
But maybe don't fight it so hard. You don't paint water, fine, the colour doesn't know that. Parking lots under a certain sky, a field just before dark, there's turquoise hiding in both. The trick I use is to let it in only as a shadow, never as the thing itself. Keep the pear a pear, let the dark side of it go cold and blue.
A full tube is a nice problem to have.
the shadow trick is the right one. I do it in glaze, a speck of copper in a clear and suddenly every white pot has a cold side and everyone thinks I did it on purpose. the celadon thing someone said below is real too, I have a green I chased for months and it was just one damn speck.
only thing I'd push back on, "keep the pear a pear" only half works. sometimes the pear wants to be turquoise and you find out six weeks later. the tube knows before you do.
Ok "the tube knows before you do" is going to live in my head rent free. But I don't know if I'm ready to hear it, because I'm the one who just spent a week staring at this thing.
The glaze thing is wild to me, I've never worked in ceramics and "a speck of copper in a clear" sounds like actual magic. Do you have to test it first or can you just toss it in and pray? Because in acrylic I'd just be guessing.
And fine, you might be right about the pear. I did a small one on a scrap board last night with a touch of it on the shadow side and now I'm thinking about a second one where the pear is just... turquoise. My daughter looked at it and said "why is the pear blue" so I'm taking that as a mixed review.
The shadow thing makes so much sense and I don't know why I didn't think of it. Keep the pear a pear. I'm going to try it on the dark side of one tonight and see if I can resist putting it anywhere else.
The "the color doesn't know you don't paint water" line got me. I do have this one field I've painted three times and never liked, right before dark, and now I'm sitting here thinking about the shadows in it.