an insomniac misanthrope who enjoys cooking, textile arts, farming and eating delicious food.
and who almost never replies to pm's or emails.
My amazon wishlist just in cases.
I want to say "cold wax", but I don't know what that's made from. It's a common way to protect watercolour painting. I suspect the traditional recipes are different than the modern ones.
I am thinking of buying myself a tube of colbalt blue oil paint.
I'm going for the basic colbalt, PB28, which is a mid to cool blue, vibrant, semi transparent, lightfast and permanent, with a fast drying time. Constable used this a lot, and since I am painting a Constable study, it might come in handy.
Colbalt blue oil paint is also woefully expensive.
As the raw materials come from only a few sources in the world, and stuff is happening there, it's probably going to be more expensive very quickly. So if I want to give it a go, now is the time.
But do I want to give it a go? I might love it and make it a staple blue. There aren't that many blue paints to choose from. Or maybe think it's a waste of money and wallow in regret. How do I know if I like it if I haven't tried it?
Well, I bought some student grade colbalt blue. Well. There is some colbalt in it, but the phthalo seems to overpower. But maybe it's enough to see if the colour will work out?
colbalt blue on the left, ultramarine on the right, 1980 student oilcolor
I choose ultramarine as the comparison as it's the blue I use the most these days.
The mixes are deliberately muddy. White, Napthol red (orange leaning so it won't purple well), yellow ochre, and hansa because it greens well with almost everything.
Although I kept the paint even by volume, the ultramarine had a stronger tinting strength. I ended up adding more colbalt to the red mix to get it to show up. Colbalt didn't grey or brown as much with the red as I expected. And looking at all three mixes, I felt as though the colbalt paint had white mixed in. It made creamly chalky mixes. It could be the calcite used as filler in this line of paint was stronger than normal? or interacted with the pigments somehow? Or maybe there was an undeclared white in there? It really felt like white had entered the mix even though I used a new brush for each mix.
The green the colbalt and hansa make (bottom of page) are electrifying. But I don't often see a colour like that in nature here. It seems more like a equatorial blue. Then again, the light Constable was painting in was similar to what we have where I live. Either the sun is low on the horizon or the summer blanketed in smoke - making it almost golden hour light year round. And he mostly used colbalt instead of ultramarine (the other bright blue available in his time).
Well, I thought myself into a corrner, so I am curious to hear your thoughts? Is it a colour you know? Do you love it? Hate it? Ignore it? Or maybe have some ideas from seeing my swatch?
Is it worth saving up to buy this colbalt blue paint?
If it's not going to kill the tree, I usually leave aphids and next year have an excess of birds that like eating aphids.
As for ants. These are the bigger problem as they bring aphids and some types help curl the leaves to protect them. Ants are such annoying farmers. I might put sticky stuff around the trunks of the trees to reduce the ant access.
an insomniac misanthrope who enjoys cooking, textile arts, farming and eating delicious food.
