UPDATE: The winner is…Cindy!
*~*~*
I didn’t have any notes for what I wanted to talk about today. I sat at my desk, turned to my computer, and opened an empty “page” for the blog. Then, I clicked on a few news/gossip sites because I can’t be still for a second on line.
Still no ideas, so I turned to my desktop which is littered with open paint palettes, a basket of paint pens, dried paper towels with dabs of dried paint, which make them very pretty, my planner, which I’ve been underutilizing lately, and my cups and pots full of pens. Not to mention the plants that line the back of my desk that are waiting for me to take them back outside since we’re done with freezes. It’s a very messy desk.
I left the palettes open last night so the paint would fully dry. This is the messiest and most used.
It’s also the first watercolor palette I ever purchased. It’s a Van Gogh travel palette–a kind of medium, student-grade palette. The Azo Yellow and Madder Lake Deep (that dark red) in the lower left corner are almost gone. I started to close the palette, but all that lovely messiness reminded me about how far I’ve come.
When I first purchased this, I was so careful not to get different colors mixed in their paint pans, and I’d CLEAN the mixing wells at the top after every use. I loved the pristine look of the palette and wasn’t comfortable with the messiness that comes from paint. Now, look at it. The white has yellow in it. The Azo has green in it. The ochre has more green in it. And those wells haven’t been cleaned in forever because that’s where the color magic happens after you mix and forget what you mixed and then mix some more…
And there aren’t enough wells for color mixing, so I use the logo space at the top to mix more colors. I love this palette. I love getting a wet brush and working the water into the dried paint until it’s buttery, and then stroking it across paper. That sounded almost sexual, didn’t it? Hmm. I need to write a story about an artist…
And off I go again. “Squirrel!”
Do you have anything you let get really, really messy because it works best that way? Comment for your choice of a download from my backlist!
