Sherri Puchalsky

r ranson wrote:Update on the painting.

I finished the first colour layer but the photos are trapped on my camera and other drama means a few more weeks until I can share the story.

In the mean time, colour has wrecked an already dubious egg.  I think it's dry enough I can take it to painting class and hopefully the teacher can help me corse correct.

I've been eagerly awaiting an update. If you'd be willing to photo and paste your "wrecked egg" before it's fixed, I'd be really interested in seeing that as well. It would really interest me, and I suspect others as well, to see how artists get "stuck" and then fix their issues.

I'm looking forward to watching the video on "black hues" in the above post as well! So glad this thread is active again, even though I don't yet have the skills to paint nor the time to develop them. I have some very old oil paints of my mother's somewhere in my basement and have wanted to dig them up and see which ones are usable at some point.

r ranson wrote:Black is a funny one.

The more I learn about painting, the more I feel beginners do best to stay away from it.  It's too easy to forget it has hue (colour) and saturation (much-ness of the colour).  It often gets treated like a value adjuster only and that's where new painters go wrong.  

Lamp and ivory black are very good blue replacement because they are very dark values, low saturation,  blue on the colour wheel.  Mars falls more towards red and is useful when the shadows want to be warm.

But the more I paint, the more I feel that shunning black paint is sad.  It's like not using the table saw because when we were four years old, it was forbidden.   Trying to cut a sheet of plywood with a safety hand saw...it works, but not as well.  

Untill about 1880, black was a well loved colour by the masters who recognized it had hue and saturation, in addition to value.  Then something snapped and suddenly it became forbidden (in western Europe and north america, but not so much elsewhere)

I love choosing which colour of black works best for which situation.  And when I need a black to behave differently than I can get it out of the tube, like a transparent black, I can quickly mix a chromatic one from three primaries.

Transparency and drying time also influence which colour black I choose.  In this case mars black is one of the naturally fastest drying pigment there is.  Nice and opaque to stand up to the bullying of Titanium white.  

I think it's important for most beginners to stay away from black and white because they/we would use "black" or "white" for many dark or light colors if they haven't yet trained themselves to recognize the difference between Mars Black, Paine's Grey, or even a very dark brownish green that's definitely not black and would look extremely out of place if black were used. We're sloppy with color descriptions. Think of the number of people described as having "black hair" and then look closely at black hair in the sunlight, preferably on a few different heads of hair! Not only are they not truly black, but the colors we notice under bright light are not the same. Some very dark hair is chestnut brown, some we'll want to accentuate the blue tones seen under bright light if we were to paint it, another has coppery notes, but all are very dark, the chestnut brown is probably the lightest in hue of the three. My mother had an art teacher who taught students, "Never use black, use Paine's Grey", and that worked fine in her work, which tended to be natural scenes with a lot of blue, but I think it's better to teach people to see, and perhaps to use caution with black, but perhaps use it deliberately. I believe I recall seeing a older National Gallery of Art painting with men in top hats where I'm pretty sure true black was used, and it was really striking. I don't recall the artist, and I could be wrong, of course, that much not quite black would also be striking.

Anyway, I agree that rules can be broken. I love this thread, and look forward to seeing the finished work. Perhaps I'll boil an egg to celebrate!

Phil Sabin wrote:we make one - but in Europe!!

The electric pump taps are designed for water cooler bottles

https://rhino-pods.com/

The general idea of making something portable with a detachable source water container, which could encourage grey or rainwater use when appropriate, and water collection containers beneath the drains is pretty cool to me. It would be interesting to develop cheap, probably less pretty portable sink setups for veggie washing for around the yard for those of us with distributed garden areas who also might want to bring it to other areas.

I'm not in Europe, but your product looks great.

Luke Mitchell wrote:

Jay Angler wrote:Are we dreaming here, Timothy??? If so, I'd like one with either a foot or knee control so I can use both hands to do the important stuff, and not get dirty hands on the spigots.

If you ran the water pipe somewhere within reach of your knees, you could use a standard lever-valve to start/stop the water flow...[images snipped]

I probably just broke the formatting and made a mess on that quote, sorry. But thank you so much for these ideas! I'm not sure if I'll make these dreams a reality, but I joined a community garden this year and became part of it's "backend crew" at the composting outhouse. The place we wash our hands after dumping the most recent poop+wood chips into the active composting toter and pumping urine into a large tank where it ages just has  circular spigots we turn with our upper forearms, and it would be great if we replaced one of them with a lever so we could turn water on and off with a single elbow or knee. I might look into that. There's usually something closer to the outhouse where most people wash their hands, but we still don't want to touch it with our hands until we've cleaned them.

The young agronomist said to the old farmer, "Your farming methods are so outdated, I'd be surprised if you got 100 bushels/acre of of corn off of that field."

The old farmer answered, "Well, I would be, too, that's sorghum."


[This was a joke one of my Agronomy professors told us as students. Corn and sorghum look a lot alike in early growth, before their tassels develop.]