Spent forty minutes this morning mixing a green that already exists in a tube
I have been chasing a particular olive for a Rosa canina leaf study since Tuesday. Viridian and yellow ochre, then a touch of burnt sienna, then too much, then starting again on a clean saucer. At about the eighth attempt I glanced up at the shelf and there was sap green, sitting in its tube, entirely unopened since March, doing nothing but being precisely the colour I wanted.
I did not use it. That is the part I am reporting honestly. I mixed a ninth saucer.
There is something in me that treats a tube green as cheating, which is absurd given that half the tradition I work in was built on ready-made pigments. Still, I would rather spend a morning failing at a mixture than take the easy route and feel vaguely dissatisfied with the result all afternoon. My husband pointed out that I could simply have used the sap green and finished the leaf before lunch. He is not wrong and I have not forgiven him for it.
The leaf is still on the board, half done, and I have decided the correct answer is to leave it overnight and look at it in the morning light, which is really just a dignified way of admitting I have lost the argument with myself.
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The ninth saucer is the real story here, not the wasted forty minutes. I do the same thing with skin tones, mixing and mixing when there is a perfectly good tube of something two feet away, and I think the honest reason is that the mixing is where I am still deciding what I am looking at. The tube gives you the answer and skips the question. That said I have started keeping one rule, which is that if attempt six is worse than attempt two I am allowed to just open the tube and stop punishing myself. It works about half the time. Sap green is a lovely one too, so at least it waits patiently for you.
The tube gives you the answer and skips the question. I have been turning that over all afternoon, and I think you are right, though I would put it slightly differently for my own case: the mixing is where I find out whether I actually know the colour or only recognise it. The ninth saucer was me insisting I could say why that olive was that olive.
Your attempt-six rule is better discipline than mine. I have no such rule, which is precisely how one arrives at a ninth saucer with a perfectly good tube going unopened. Though I would add a caveat: sometimes attempt six is worse because I have learned something in five, and abandoning it there costs me the thing I was about to notice. Difficult to tell the difference in the moment, of course.
Sap green does wait patiently. It has waited since March without complaint.
The mixing as deciding what you are looking at, yes, that is the useful part. But I would push back a little on the tube giving you the answer. It gives you a green, not your green. Sap green straight from the tube is a bit of a liar about the temperature of a leaf in morning light, and you end up fighting it on the canvas instead of on the saucer.
Where I agree without reservation is the attempt six rule. Six is generous. I usually know by four.