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spent an hour trying to rematch a green i mixed six weeks ago for the left half of a canvas and it's just not happening. same tube, same brand, same ratio, and it's off by a hair that i can't unsee. i've got the old swatch taped to the easel like a missing person poster. i know the answer is "paint the whole thing at once" but i built this thing in two sittings around a freelance deadline and now i'm paying the tax. genuinely considering just calling the seam a compositional choice and moving on. it's not a compositional choice. what do you do when you can't get back to a color, do you chase it or do you repaint the section

Spent most of this week on two large ones, 190 x 150, and for once the grey held. That sounds small. It is not small. Grey is the thing that eats me alive in the studio. Mixed warm it turns to mud, mixed cool it turns to dishwater, and after three days of layering and scraping back you look at it and feel nothing. This time I took the cold wax down hard, more than I usually dare, and kept the pigment lean. It dried matte, slightly chalky, and the colour underneath keeps showing through at the edges where I dragged the scraper. Two days ago I stood in front of it and did not want to fix anything. That almost never happens. Usually I want to fix everything. The other canvas is still fighting me. Same mix, same hand, and it sits there like wet cardboard. I keep telling myself the good one only looks good because the bad one is next to it, which is probably true and also useless as advice. I have a show in the spring, so the timing is good. The market can do what it does. Right now I am mostly relieved that a colour I have been chasing since about 2019 finally stood still for a minute.

I've been working on this little still life for three days, just lemons and a blue cloth, nothing fancy, and I mixed this gorgeous warm shadow color yesterday, like a deep ochre-y purple, it was PERFECT. Came back this morning and it's dried into this weak, chalky lavender thing that has absolutely nothing to do with what I saw on my palette. And I KNOW gouache dries down, I know this, I've been painting with it for years, but it still gets me every time. I just sat there staring at it like... who are you. I tried glazing a thin wash of the original mix back over it and now it looks muddy and overworked and I think I need to just let it dry again and reassess but I'm so annoyed. The lemons were looking so good 😭 Has anyone found a reliable way to predict the dry-down shift or is it just eternal suffering and learning to mix everything a little punchier than you think you need?

I am painting a corner of my studio in the late afternoon light and it is beating me. The wall on the left is a cold grey, the wall behind is a warm grey, and the floor throws a third grey up into both. Three greys, all different, all related. I should be able to mix this. I have been mixing greys for twenty five years. Today: burnt umber and ultramarine, too purple. Raw umber and white, dead. Ivory black and yellow ochre, chalk. I added a hair of viridian and made it worse. Six piles of mud on the palette by eleven o'clock, and the light had already moved on. The corner that was so beautiful at nine was gone. The annoying part is I know what the mistake is. I am mixing the grey I think the wall is instead of the grey I actually see. My head has an idea about what a grey wall looks like and my hand keeps reaching for it. Two hours of painting my idea instead of the thing. Tomorrow I'll scrape the whole corner back to the ground and start with clean, cool, no preconception. Bof. Easy to say tonight with a glass of wine in my hand. Cadmium prices are one thing. Losing a morning to my own stubbornness is another.

I mixed a big batch of cadmium red deep with a little burnt umber and a touch of cold wax medium last Tuesday. Laid it down in a broad band across the bottom third of a 180 x 140. Looked right. Earthy but alive. Yesterday I walked in and it had gone brown. Flat and dead. Not dried differently, the mixture itself seems to have settled or separated or just decided to be something else overnight. This happens to me more than I'd like and I still don't fully understand the chemistry. The pigment particles are heavy, I know that. Maybe the cold wax lets them migrate in ways I'm not accounting for. Or maybe I'm just not mixing thoroughly enough. But I stir it for a good five minutes, scrape and fold. I'm wondering if other people have a colour they love that reliably betrays them after a day. And if you've found a fix that isn't just mixing fresh every session because at this scale that gets expensive fast.

Not as a study, not trying to match anything specific. Just mixing it, scraping it off, mixing again. Different combinations of ivory black and white, a little ultramarine, a touch of raw umber, sometimes a speck of yellow ochre. Seeing how far I could push the temperature before it stopped being grey and became something else entirely. My husband came in to ask about dinner and I think he was a little alarmed. But this is the thing nobody tells you when you start painting, you will spend whole days doing something that looks like nothing, and it's not wasted time. The hand learns things the eye can't explain. What's your useless practice? The thing you do that produces nothing visible but you know matters.

ok so this is embarrassing and i'm probably the only person who does this but when i'm mixing colors, like really sitting there trying to nail a specific green or getting a skin tone right, i have a playlist i made that's literally just the first 30 seconds of songs repeated. like the buildup part over and over. i don't know why it works but my brain just turns off the "am i doing this right" noise and i can actually feel what the color needs. my partner walked in the other day and was like "...is this the same song?" and i had to explain myself and it sounded insane. but the color i mixed after that? genuinely the best warm grey i've ever made. so i'm not sorry hahaha does anyone else have a weird little ritual that sounds dumb but actually does something for your work??

Okay so three years ago in school I was trying to mix a stormy gray and instead produced this absolutely foul brownish-green, like the color of hospital cafeteria food, and I was so mad I almost threw the palette across the room. But I kept a little swatch of it in my sketchbook because I don't know, I thought maybe it'd be funny someday. Today I fished it out and I'm honestly obsessed. It's genuinely hideous. It's not a color you'd ever choose. But I've been staring at it all afternoon and I think there's something in it, like it's the exact color of "almost wrong" and you can't buy that in a tube. I mixed it again from memory and I got it almost identical, which is honestly the most pointless skill I've ever developed, and I'm considering a whole little series of paintings built around it. My partner just looked at the swatch and said "that's the one you kept??" with such genuine confusion and I feel so vindicated. Anyone else got a color they should have thrown out but couldn't? Or am I just weird about my own failures haha

Been using the same mix of ferric nitrate and water for twenty years. I know exactly how it will take on a given piece of steel, how the humidity matters, how clean the surface is, whether I've overheated the metal before applying it. The bottle from the supply house gives you a predictable brown that looks like nothing I've ever seen on actual weather-worn steel. Last week I watched a younger guy in the shared shop spray on a commercial patina from a pump bottle and wait for it to look like something. That's not how it works. You build it in layers, you react to what the metal does, you stop when it's right, sometimes ten minutes in, sometimes three days. I'm not saying everyone should mix their own. I'm saying the shortcuts don't teach you what's happening.

I had about 40 minutes after bedtime to get the sky in on this field piece and I mixed what I always mix, ultramarine and a touch of white, that cold early-spring blue. She wandered out for water, looked over my shoulder, and said it looked like the sky in a cartoon. Then she went to bed. So that was helpful. The annoying part is she's not wrong. I've been using the same blue mix for years because it works and I don't have to think about it, and now I can't unsee it. It's flat. It reads like a color I chose instead of a color that was there. So now I'm going down the rabbit hole of warm blues and I'm realizing how much of my palette is just habit. Same three mixes over and over. I've got a tube of cerulean I bought in like 2019 that I've barely touched because it felt "too pretty." Not sure what I'll land on but the sky is going to be worse before it gets better.

there's a specific green in my head that i've been chasing since like march. like a vinegar green, sort of sour, slightly dirty. cadmium yellow light + phthalo + a touch of raw umber got me close enough that i stopped noticing the difference, which honestly might be the goal and might also be cope. the thing that bugs me is that i know it's just sap green territory. i could've walked into the store and paid eleven dollars and had it in nine minutes. but every time i go to buy it my brain goes "no you need to earn it" and then i lose an afternoon. i think i've made peace with the fact that mixing IS the hobby and painting is what i do with the leftovers. also the leftover jar is now almost full of a green nobody asked for and i can't throw it out because that feels like admitting something.

There is a particular kind of stupid I only do in oil. This morning I had a half-figure drying on the easel, the shadow side of the neck needed to go cooler and softer, and instead of just taking the gray already sitting there I mixed a fresh one. Lead white, a touch of raw umber, viridian. Beautiful. Put it down. It was the same gray. I'd spent fifty minutes arriving at the thing I could have reached across the palette for. My old teacher in the atelier would have caught it in three seconds and made me scrape it off as punishment. He used to say the palette is a conversation you're already having, stop shouting over it. I thought that was just cruelty at the time. It's not. It's the whole job. Anyway the neck is better now. I kept the second gray, used it on the ear. Waste not. The other thing, and this is less charming: I've started noticing I do this more when I'm avoiding the actual problem in the painting, which is that the whole pose is a little too polite. The figure is sitting too nicely. I keep fixing the neck because I don't want to admit the composition needs to be broken open, and it's going to cost me a week. Voilà.

Forty minutes into the morning class, a woman who has been painting for eleven months puts down a grey that made me stop mid-sentence. Not a grey from a tube. She mixed it herself, three pigments she had no business combining yet, and it was exactly the colour of the north wall of my studio in November at five in the afternoon. I have been chasing that grey for something like twenty years and mostly failing. The thing that annoyed me, and I mean this sincerely, is that she did not notice. I said something, she shrugged, she said it looked muddy and went back to her shadow side. I spent the rest of the session working on a hand in a portrait commission and thinking about that grey. A good grey is genuinely one of the most difficult things in this whole business. You can teach value, you can teach the drawing, you can teach edges until you are hoarse. You cannot teach someone to arrive at a particular grey on the right day. It happens when it happens. Then she wiped it off the palette at the end of the class with a rag like it was dirty water.

for years i just bought the same three midtone tubes and called it a day. human skin in the jar, basically. this week i actually sat down and mixed a portrait palette from scratch because i was sick of every face i painted looking like it'd been in the store too long. i was fully expecting toxic sludge for the first hour. but i got it. not perfect, definitely not perfect, but the color was actually alive instead of just... flesh-toned. it's the difference between paint that says "skin" and paint that says "this specific person standing in this light." anyway now i can't stop looking at people's wrists in public. i'm one of those now. 💀

I've been going through the last few boxes I still had in storage. Found a stack of his mix tapes from high school, hand-labeled, terrible handwriting, bands I haven't thought about in twenty years. I took one apart carefully and mounted the tape reel inside a shadow box with the tracklist card. Just the thing itself, no embellishment. It came out better than I expected. It's not for sale, I think. Maybe I'll keep it for myself. Felt good to work on something that wasn't trying to be anything. Just a record of someone existing.

there's a piece on my table right now, 24x30, was supposed to be two figures against a wall of flat ochre. spent last night getting the ochre right, which took like forty minutes because ochre is a liar, and then this morning i mixed a grey that matched the shadow under the chin perfectly and just... painted the whole background with it instead. the ochre's gone. it's under there somewhere. and here's the thing, it's better. it's flatter and colder and the figures read harder against it. but i can't tell if i actually think that or if i'm just rationalizing forty minutes of work i just buried. i've done this before, this is like the fourth time this year i've fallen in love with a neutral and let it eat the composition. starting to think my real problem isn't color it's that i don't trust a warm field to hold anything. anyway i'm leaving it. if i scrape it back i lose the chin shadow and that's the only part that's working. someone tell me if the ochre deserved better or if i did it a favor

Myself Ramesh, doing Mithila painting. I want to ask one thing about colours but first I will tell what happened. For the peacock body I use a blue from the nil plant, dried and powdered by my own hand. Old stock was finished. New batch I got from a man in Darbhanga and the blue is coming out flat, like the blue of a plastic bucket, no depth at all. I mixed with a little of the black from lamp soot and the whole thing went grey and dull. Today I took handmade paper, that sheet I keep only for testing colours, and I painted the whole thing over with the new blue in different strengths, twelve patches, one to twelve. Still nothing. The old blue in my mind is the colour of a peacock neck in shade, deep but alive. This one is only sitting there on the paper, doing nothing. Trouble is I have the full border already done in the old blue, fine line, three days of work, and the peacock body will come in the middle. If I use new blue it will not match and the whole painting is spoiled. If I wait for old stock, maybe months, maybe never. Someone told me to use the acrylic blue from the market. Colour will be correct but for me it is not the same work then. Anybody else faced this with natural pigment, one batch gone and the new one not matching? How you manage? I am not asking for sympathy only, I want to know what to actually do.

i mix a lot of color at once, like way more than a single painting needs, because rematching a color two days later is the worst part of this whole job. nothing kills a session faster than trying to rebuild a specific orange from memory at 11pm. so now there's a shelf. twelve jars. and from a normal distance they are all the same orange. up close, four of them are actually that orange, three are muddy because i got impatient and added black too early (again), and the rest are... cousins. i labeled them with masking tape and my handwriting has fully deteriorated, so half the labels just say "warm?" and one says "NO". the annoying part is i use all of them. i'll reach for the muddy one on purpose sometimes because it reads flatter and i like that. so i can't even throw them out and call it growth. anyway i'm buying more jars. not a question, just logging it.

Noticed tonight that the middle of my palette is one gray-brown mass that I keep reactivating with water instead of squeezing out anything new. Burnt sienna, ultramarine, a little hansa yellow in there somewhere. It's basically mud with a history. It started because I was trying to stretch paint during the school break, and now it's August and I'm still doing it. Squeezing a fresh blob off the tube feels almost wasteful, like I'm spending money I don't have on a color I could just fake. Which is silly, tubes cost what they cost and I bought them already. But here's the thing I actually noticed. Everything I've painted since spring has the same temperature to it. That grayed-out look. Even the porch light in the painting on my easel right now, which should be warm, has this dead olive cast because I mixed it out of the pile instead of starting clean. So tomorrow I'm scraping the whole thing down to the white. Scraping it, not wet-paper-toweling it. Getting the plastic knife out and everything. I've got a tube of cad yellow light that's been sitting unopened since my birthday in May. The kids go back next week and I'll have my evenings again. That's part of it I think. Hard to start anything new when you're snatching twenty minutes at a time.

ok so I have this porcelain palette, the big rectangle one, and I got it when I went full time in March as a "you're a real artist now" gift to myself. told myself I'd clean it every single session. it is now December-ish and there is a layer of dried paint in there that has its own topography. like I can see the ghost of every painting I've made this year in the mixing wells. there's a specific grey-brown in the corner from that commission that went badly, I know exactly which one. and here's the thing, I KNOW you're supposed to work clean, my old professor would have a stroke, but I've started dipping into the old dried stuff with a wet brush and getting these colors I could never mix on purpose. like accidental neutrals. this dusty mauve that only exists because I was lazy in October. I've used it in three paintings since. my partner keeps offering to scrub it for me as a nice gesture and I keep saying no and I can't fully explain why without sounding insane. anyway I just spent 40 minutes mixing a green for a leaf and got it in two tries off the mud so. posting this instead of admitting anything to my professor. does anyone else hoard their palette like this or am I the only gremlin here