Some people water gardens...

It's just past midnight at the end of a very hard-for-me weekend.  Exhaustion is insidious and ultimately commands attention.  I slept a lot today, and watered my soul with tears and silence.

Chuck took the kids swimming and then to dinner with Grandma.  Grandma got to tool around Penfield Wegmans in her electric wheelchair, giving information on the food she would like us to buy for her!

Some people water gardens.  I'm not too good at that.  However, now that I have a little rest inside me, I am watering my watercolors.  It's one of those paint maintenance things that I do from time to time.  It isn't necessary, but it gives me something peaceful and easy to do.  I open each palette and put a couple of drops of water on each mound of dried paint.  Some colors -- Perinone Orange, for example -- become parched and crack open like parched land sometimes does.  Great gullies and rifts.  Others like Amazonite Genuine become dry all through and absorb the water like a sponge.

In any event, paints that have been watered recently are much easier to use in painting.  They re-wet better, and this means that they form better textures quickly.  The way I do it, the paints reconstitute to nearly the same texture as when they came from the tubes...  just a little drier, so that they solidify again when I'm done painting.  When I'm done painting, the big challenge is to keep the palette upright until the paints no longer run.

Sometimes I take a pile of toothpicks and stir the paints in their pans until the consistency is really smooth and I can level the paint in the pan.  I won't do that tonight.  If Perinone Orange, Winsor Lemon and Winsor Red look as unhappy tomorrow morning as they do now, I probably will stir them then.

In addition to soothing me, watering my paints is a good first step when I want to refill the pans.  My tiny (7 color) palette sees a lot of use and I actually use up the half-pans fairly quickly.  My other palettes last a fairly long time between refills, like 6 months or a year or more.  And I never, ever have to water the St. Petersburg / Yarka paints.  The соус (sauce) that St. Petersburg uses seems never to dry out.

I see that I wouldn't 'need' to do this watering of the paints if I painted with one palette and painted every day...

I don't remember when I switched myself to this very limited palette (Hansa Yellow Medium, Quinacridone Red, French Ultramarine Blue, Winsor Lemon, Winsor Red, Winsor Blue and Sap Green).  I'm sure it was sometime this summer, maybe in June.  It has been a great learning experience, since it has been about six months since I used any convenience colors other than Sap Green.  I still have a lot of learning to go...

Reading and looking at other people's work has made me realize that I have shortchanged the earth colors.  In their raw states, they don't appeal to me.  But I just saw a mixture of Cerulean and Burnt Umber that produced a most beautiful gray.  I need to learn the earth colors and what they can do.

For the last two days, or more, I have been playing with dip pens, including a bamboo pen that I bought and a bamboo skewer from the kitchen drawer, and now I am beginning to play with some natural sponges.  Not doing anything useful.  Just doodle and splat.  Checking out textures, the effects of wetness / dryness... Oh, yes, and I did try barbering a fan brush to get a more interesting texture with it, but so far haven't improved it much.  :-)

A couple of weeks ago, Karen came home from Asia bearing the cutest thing:  Pentel's Aquash field painting set.  Eight watercolors in crayon form, plus a waterbrush and a palette.  I am still learning to use the crayons so that I get watercolor textures and not crayon textures.  The same problem applied when I tried Carol's Derwent Intense pencils a few weeks ago.  In both cases, the colors are great:  rich, subtle, blendable.  In both cases, I left crayon-like marks on the paper that my Arches squirrel brush could not eliminate.

Clearly I could use something with more scrubbing power and probably move a lot of that pigment off the paper and into solution!  But I am training myself to work with these squirrel brushes because they require a much different attitude on my part.  In the first phase, I had to give up a lot of control...  Even now, 6 months later, I still have trouble getting the water-in-brush amount correct.  Too much and everything runs.  Too little and the brush has no life, no spring.

So, in case anyone reading this has the idea that I spend hours every day painting, rest assured:  it is not so.  But I do spend some time nearly every day soothing my soul with some form of playing with paint!  I have the 5" x 8" samples to prove it.