Saturday, July 8, 2017

More than you'd ever want to know about Jerry's paint rituals



I recently revised my system of paint mixing. The paints in the box, 35 of them, constitute the current Map palette. Those bottles queued up on the right are waiting to get blended into that palette. When the "Add new color" command comes up in the cards the next jar on the wait list gets added to the jar bearing that day's date. As much of is added as is needed to fill the dated jar to the neck. The altered jar gets shaken, and samples of the new color are recorded in my log book and painted onto the jar's cap.

This represents a fairly radical change from the old "Add new color" protocol. In that earlier version the new color was added to the palette jar nearest the new color in hue. That meant that changes to the palette were pretty subtle. Under the new rules a bottle of blue might be added to a current bottle of red or yellow. The results would be, as you can imagine, fairly dramatic.

The new protocol may result in a palette that consists of 35 shades of mud or taupe. That would cause me to rethink the whole process. We'll see!