spent 40 minutes today mixing a green I could've bought for $9
my palette has this specific olive I use for shadows on skin and it's a nightmare to hit. chromium oxide green, a little yellow ochre, touch of burnt umber, and then you breathe on it wrong and it goes army surplus.
today i finally got it perfect. wrote the ratios down on a scrap of canvas board like a wartime recipe. then immediately realized i could've just bought sap green and saved myself half an hour.
anyway the painting's still not done and now i have a scrap of canvas board with paint math on it that i'll lose by thursday.
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This I understand very well, ji. In our work also we mix the colours ourselves, from stone and clay and flower, and people ask why not just buy a tin of ready-made. But the mixing is not only for the colour. When you grind it yourself you know what is inside, and the hand learns something the shop cannot teach. Your olive will be yours now, not chromium oxide's.
One suggestion only, from an old man: do not keep the ratio on canvas board. Copy it in a notebook with the date. Canvas board gets lost by Thursday, notebook also gets lost but at least you will find it years later and remember.