When I went to bed last night I was only going to have like I don't know two and a half or three hours to sleep and I was like well I don't know
Do I lay down and I tried to sleep but I don't think I really fell asleep I think I just kind of drifted in and out mostly awake
So it's pretty tired today but I went ahead and drove myself in and it was so much faster driving myself have all these little like shortcut ways to do things and I mean I'm not quite up to driving full speed again cuz I still feel kind of awkward driving but I think I still drive faster than my mother
And I took West Park and you could drive 40 on West Park and there isn't a lot of traffic usually and there aren't as many stop lights so I mean when she drives it's like 45 minutes and I think it was like 30 or 35 minutes but I feel like it was closer to 30 it's about 9 or 10 miles
But I didn't go on the freeway cuz that would not make it faster I don't feel like
And besides I don't really like to drive on the freeway I mean I like to drive on the highway but not necessarily in my car although the speedometer has been working pretty much all the time so that's good
But I wanted to get some new paints still in that qor paint but some different colors
And I've been giving it a lot of thought and I wanted to get the transparent yellow oxide but then when I got there they had restocked and they had a lot of paints that they didn't have before and so I also got the nickel titanite yellow
And I wanted to get a darker red and I was kind of going back and forth and back and forth about which one to get and I was thinking about a lizard and crimson but I can mix a lizard and crimson because I've got when I got the high chroma set it has transparent pyrrol orange and quinacridone magenta and if you mix those two together you can get the full range of warm to cool reds within a certain tone or color family group whatever you can get reds all the way up and down the scale
And then I got quinacridone red light which is very similar in a lot of ways to that matter lake Dore
It's kind of an orangy red but then it's got a pinky undertone it's really beautiful and so then that when I mix that in that takes it in kind of a different direction and so I gave it a lot of thought and I decided to get the pyrrol red deep which is not really a color that I would normally get
I find I have these colors that are like me colors and that pyrrol orange is also not a color that I would get and I don't really use it on its own but it's great for mixing well I mean it's a pretty color on its own it's just a bright orange which is not something I would normally use The quinacridone magenta is very much in a color family that I would use
But I don't actually use it by itself I mix it also
So I thought well you know with these paints I'm doing a lot of that you know mixing colors and I really wanted a Mars violet or a perelyne maroon
I'm not sure I spelled that right in fact I kind of think I didn't but I can't be bothered to look it up not maroon the other word parelene
So I looked at all the reds they had and I was like well I could get the cadmium red deep but I don't think that's going to do it but the pier all deep I was pretty sure that would mix to the color that I wanted
And then I mean obviously I can use my periline green but I watched somebody talking about the cobalt green and that's a color that I feel like I wouldn't normally get but the cobalt teal I love in that line and that's a color that I wouldn't normally get either so I felt like well you know it's kind of in the same color family as the perylene green but it's super granulating and you know I watched somebody talking about how you know you can get some really great effects if you wash it over a staining color and then you've got this like you know green granulating over and they showed some leaves and I was like okay well you know you've kind of sold me on it it's not a color I would normally get it's not a me color
And I'm surprisingly a verse to using colors that are not quote me colors end quote
So I went up to the studio and I had to like swatch them all out mixing all the colors and figure out how they worked and the yellow it's to be honest with you it's very similar to the yellow that I started with when I started the watercolor painting that I was like nope nope nope except that it's a little softer and it it just looks a little more natural even though it's so intensely cool yellow it's it's just very different even though it's not very different but it is very different and then the transparent yellow oxide it doesn't lay down as smoothly as I would like for it to the colors great but it's a little streaky but what I was kind of wanting to do the effect I was wanting to get was to lay down that very light yellow that's like just a bright ray of sunshine and then wash the transparent yellow oxide over it so that even those two colors you get kind of an effect of it being kind of one thing and I do like it like that also if I take the green gold and I dilute it so that it's in its green yellow tone and doesn't have the more greeny mass tone and I mix it with that yellow I get a really beautiful lemon yellow which is not a color I would use a lot but you know it's good to have and then if I mix it with my derelied yellow I'm not going to look that up that's not spelled right either I get a lighter warm yellow because that derelide yellow is almost orange it's I love it and the reason why I picked that yellow is that the high chromoset came with quinacranone gold and I hate that color I don't know why everybody loves it but I just hate it it's in its mass tone it's this kind of brownie color and then you can dilute it down and get a decent yellow but you've really got to dilute it a lot and yeah it's great and mixing tones but I don't tend to mix those things so it's it's kind of depressing to me and I had on my other palette golden ocher by DaVinci which is a blend of yellow ocher but I don't remember if it's the natural one or the synthetic one and then p y 83 and I didn't know what PY 83 was and I even think I looked it up and it said you know industrial use blah blah but it didn't have a name and so then when I found this girl I'd yellow I'm like well that looks pretty close and then I looked on the pigment and it's 83 so essentially if I mix a little of the transparent yellow oxide into that I'll probably get my golden ocher that I like so much and the transparent yellow oxide is very similar to the Ross in a deep I think it's called by DaVinci that's not actually a sienna it's actually a yellow ocher it's the other one whichever one one of them the raw sienna deep and the golden ocher one of them is the natural yellow ocher and one of them is the synthetic one but I can't remember right now which is which so the Rossi and a deep even though it's called rosiana it isn't rosiana it's actually Jesus it's just typing in what the f*** ever it wants to You probably figure out what I'm talking about if you just kind of hooked on phonics it
So even though it says it's raw sienna it's actually yellow ocher and on my regular palette I have that one and I have the golden ocher and those are the only yellows I use and I love them and now I feel like I have all the components of those colors even though they're not in exactly the same configuration and they're going to work exactly the same way but they're kind of you know my colors and I was using the Naples yellow that came with it for kind of all of those things but it's very opaque and it's kind of a muddy color so I haven't been very happy with it as comprising that large of a percentage of my yellows so now I have all these weird yellows that I'm going to be mixing together in various different ways and it's kind of exciting
And I have that green which I really haven't figured out yet but I did use it a little bit and it's it's cool there's definitely a little bit of a trick to it
And then the pure all red why when I'm saying pure all is it saying pure all peer pier all or maybe pyrol ah there we go pyrol red That's not spelled right but it's closer pure all well there we go again pyroll red deep didn't look exactly the same in person as it looked in the videos and on this watch cards and stuff and funnily enough the original red that I got was just a regular purol red not deep and I didn't like it and when I looked at this there was initially a little bit of that same feeling in me like nope nope nope and I'm like you know this is a beautiful beautiful color and you're using it for mixing anyway so just calm the f*** down so I mixed it and tried it with all these different things and it's so beautiful mixed with the quinacridone burnt orange which isn't really burnt orange I don't know why they call it burn orange because every other brand calls that quinacridone burnt scarlet and it's the same pigment number so and it's the same color does not look like orange I don't know why they call it that but when you mix that with that PRD that is a beautiful f****** color
I mean it's pretty on its own and it was pretty with every color that I mixed it with but the color that got it to the kind of murky purpley color that I wanted was indigo which kind of surprised me
It's also quite a good color mixed with raw sienna no not rossiana raw umber now why did you read Ross sienna once and then rosiana the other time I guess I've got a heavier accent than I thought I had
Anyway all that took a little while
But anyway that painting features all those colors except for the green The green that's in there is the shminka olive forest olive which I really love that color but I can't tell that it's granulating at all so I'm not sure why it's a super granulating color but I really like it in fact it's kind of funny because I sort of think that my favorite colors well I like the gray a lot I think it's forest gray and I like the I think it's tundra blue which is basically just ultramarine blue with raw umber but ultramarine blue I have never really liked it I mean that's like everybody's favorite blue and everybody puts it on there standard palette and all that kind of stuff but I just I don't like it and I don't like cobalt blue I don't like those blues I like the Daniel Smith soda light genuine a lot but most people don't consider that to be a blue I mean I could literally use that as the only blue in my palette but most people consider it to be like a gray or a black substitute but then you know I'm mad about the indigo so when you put the the raw umber in there it just I don't know exactly what it does to it cuz it still looks blue but it takes it down out of the range of that bluey blue and it gives it a little something something that all of a sudden I love it so I really like that color I really like the deep sea indigo which is just this very gentle kind of bluey purpley gray it's nothing like an indigo I don't know why they call it indigo it's like weird colors that I would never use it's like Veridian green and cobalt violet or something but it doesn't really granulate much but it's just a really beautiful color and that forest olive it doesn't granulate but it's a really beautiful color The deep sea green isn't really a green it's more of a blue green turquoise tealy kind of color it's actually very similar to the Mayan blue that I had on my other palette
But yeah I like some sort of a dark dark indigoy type blue and then like a manganese blue which is a greeny blue
I was getting along just fine with the indigo in the cobalt teal but the cobalt teal is heavily granulating and so was like well I didn't want everything to be granulating so you know I looked long and hard and I was like you know you sure you don't want to get like cobalt blue or ultramarine blue or Indanthrene blue
And I'm like nope I want manganese blue
And manganese blue isn't made with manganese anymore they make it look like manganese blue but they use phthalo blue but it's not intense like phthalo blue I mean my mom she seems to use phthalo blue almost exclusively but I don't like phthalo blue I mean it's kind of pretty but it's so intense it takes over everything and it's it's too much and it's a little too green but the manganese blue I read this whole article one time talking about how this woman she went through all kind of jump through all kind of hoops trying to find the exact color of a blue sunny sky and she decided it was cobalt blue and a particular brand and whatever but I disagree for me that sunny blue sky looks like manganese blue so I don't know
But I don't know if you can tell what I'm painting and I got a smaller piece of paper that full sheet watercolor is pretty huge and I kept having to like turn it so I could get to the stuff I wanted to paint because I couldn't really reach well I could kind of reach but not well enough to really get at it the way I wanted to so I kept having to rotate the paper and that works fine for what I was doing but it was going to work less fine for what I was doing and besides I wasn't sure that this one I'm working on was worth using up a whole sheet of really good watercolor paper so
You know my mother asked me anything about watercolor I know everything when she gave me that piece of paper I was asking her you know what kind of paper is this because it had this very smooth surface that wasn't like a hot press then it wasn't like a cold pressed and I couldn't quite figure out what it was and she's like I don't know so anyway I went downstairs cuz I wanted to find out if they had something similar but in a smaller size and I was really aiming for 18x24 but they don't have that so I got 16x20 which is really quite a good size and so I was looking at them and Lucy and I were having a discussion and she was talking about hot press paper being good if you want to get more you know hard edge outlines and puddles and whatnot and cold press and I mean I'm familiar with the hot press and the cold press generally and this didn't seem like either one and so we were going back and forth and back and forth and Vicky's like well you know a hot press on a 300 lb paper is very different from a hot press on 140 lb paper
And so you know I took a look at the hot press on the 300 lb paper and that is in fact what it was cuz you know I can pretty much look at it and tell but for sure when I touch it I can tell and when my mom had given me the sheet of paper I'm like I'm sure this is watercolor paper cuz it really feels like some kind of printmaking paper you know it was thick and kind of soft and it had this very smooth surface
And then my mom had come in I got there about 11:00 and she wandered in sometime after 1:00 and when I got back upstairs with my paper she's like well it says on the paper what it is and I'm like if it says on the paper what it is then why were you like I don't know when I asked you what it was before and she's like I don't know but if you would take in that piece of paper downstairs Vicky could have told you what it was and I'm like well I didn't really want to take my finished painting and drag it all around the store I'm like besides I could just feel the papers and tell
So it was kind of weird but watercolor paper is kind of expensive
I don't know if you can really tell yet what I'm trying to paint
I'm hoping that it's going to read as kind of like a really big field it's kind of undulating with flowers and plants and stuff with the sky in the background but it's been a while since I've seen one of those and I'm doing it in kind of a slight well not slightly abstracted fairly abstracted internal landscape kind of thing but I'm pretty happy with it so far except the sky I got the sky a little darker than I actually wanted to get it because I was going to use the deep sea indigo but then like I put down that ultra marine blue tender blue I put that ultramarine and raw umber blue down on the paper and I was like oh no that's darker than what I wanted to use and I'm like oh but it's so pretty and so that I just went ahead and painted it that color and I'm trying to kind of blot it out so that I don't get it too dark and I didn't really leave any clouds and I really should have left some clouds so that I went in with this Daniel Smith iridescent topaz color which is kind of like a gold but it's not as gold as that it's just like it's iridescent and it's light and it's kind of vaguely gold but somewhere between like gold and champagne with a little more yellow in it than champagne it's a really pretty color but it didn't quite read the way I wanted it to so I'm not 100% happy with the sky and I don't know whether to go in with like some gouache or acrylic or something we're just leave it be or what
So I think I've been up like 36 hours because even though I was exhausted earlier as soon as the sun went down my alter ego came out and it's not tired but I am tired I got some stuff I need to do tomorrow so I can't just sleep all day
Kitty is looking very put upon he says why will you not go to bed we are supposed to be sleeping I barely got any sleep last night and now you're going to make sure I don't get any sleep tonight of course what could he mostly does asleep right but apparently the only sleep that gives him really good sleep is when he's sleeping on me when he's sleeping on his blanket or in his little bed or in the thing in the window that he likes to sleep on or any of the other sleeps places that doesn't count so I am ruining his life by not sleeping now
He has a very hard life does kitty
So anyway I love you very much sweetheart You sleep well
goodnight 💋
