Painting: Colours

I'm learning a good deal about me and painting. One important thing is that I don't LIKE having lots of colours available in tubes, particularly; what I love most is mixing colours and creating the right ones, especially when it happens on the brush and on the canvas (mm, lovely oils; I painted something red and yellow today which I very nearly ate, it was so gloopy and colouredy and downright sensual. Omnomnom).

I'm looking at buying more acrylic paint - I've been using Daler Rowney in tubes of 120ml and am looking at Winsor and Newton in tubes of 60ml, hoping they're thicker - but the sets all seem to have 10 or more colours. Same with Gouache starter sets. Too many colours. I would like to start with the RIGHT shades of red, yellow, and blue, and some white, and go on from there.

I also want to find a palette to use with my acrylics; I got one which looked very useful but is actually rubbish and irritating. I think that for oils I may well end up using a classic flat lump of wood wiv a hole in, but I don't know what's best for acrylics. I hate cleaning up after them. Must buy some chemical wipe things.

But mixing colours as I paint is the best thing in the universe ever. That, and secret things around corners.

Day

Got up. Did my teeth. Dressed. Dressed Astrid. Spent two hours clearing the kitchen so I could get myself something to eat and drink. Urgh.

Did two dishwasher loads, two laundry loads, scrubbed down two counters, picked broken crockery off the floor and swept up the shards, emptied bins, took stuff out of the recycling bin and flattened it so that more could go in (there were loads of cardboard boxes in there unsquashed), then cleared and wiped the dining table (in sections, because there was a game scattered all over it). Then Astrid needed to be fed, so I didn't get to eat EVEN THEN, when it was after noon.

But then a friend came over and I ate and drank lukewarm coffee from the flask Rob left beside the bed when he left at 6:25am and we put away the game and everyone made paper airplanes and stuff. When they left, I brought three children and two paintings to the post office and posted the paintings away to other homes and kept the children.

Then we got two buses to the True Food Co-op and it only took half an hour, and I got bananas and things for salad and icecream, and we will gloss over the rest of the evening until we got home and had a massive lasagne and a guest and I did some watercolour painting and found that I am just plain irritated by watercolours in pans and I need the ones in tubes. I feel like perhaps I ought to use these ones anyway but I suspect that's flawed thinking. I will experiment with more expensive acrylics, and later I will buy gouache, and I will stick to buying only about six colours total and mixing from that - because mixing is what brings me joy - and I will remember that I am allowed to feel how I feel about my paints.

And when I have found some tubes of watercolours I like, I will give my lovely box to someone who really wants it, because it's a lovely lovely box of paints. It's just not what I want to be using, because I am picky.