Trying out the blue with a test painting

You may remember my flutter of initial excitement about the possibility of adding a stable blue to my palette. Yesterday I finally tried it in a quick painting in my journal. It worked! It’s so exciting to have this color to use now. But until next year, the supply is very small and I’ll have to go sparing with it. Once the dayflowers begin blooming, I’ll get busy harvesting and storing up more pigment.

How much blue on hand?

At first glance it seems like not much! All the pigment I have is stored in these 3 squares. The darkest one is almost fully saturated. The missing corner is the amount I used to do the blue in my painting in the photo above. It’s a small painting, almost 5 x 7″. There was a lot of pigment in that tiny snip, though, so it does seem to go a long ways. Unless I go wild with blue, I think these squares will last until the flowers bloom again next summer.

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Author/Artist Info
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In the summer of 2018 I began making watercolor paints from the rocks, clay, and other resources of our land here in the Ozarks. My artwork is made exclusively with these paints. I call them Wild Ozark Paleo Paints, because they’re made in a way very close to the same way paints were made when man first put a hand-print on the wall of a cave. My specialty is painting nature, specifically the nature that surrounds me here in the remote hills of northwest Arkansas.

My Portfolio is at PaleoPaints.com

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