Painting finally pays off.
TomD
I took up painting last year, and being me, my plan to ramp up slowly has not held. The idea was to buy very minimal supplies and learn a lot and work my way into it. As it turned out, the local Michaels was on a blow out sale pattern, prior to the virus, and I could not resist burdening myself with bags of paint, even though my main idea was to use a limited pallet of 3 primaries.
So the minimal payoff so far is that I have learned to mix any colour I want. I can now take on restoration projects in House Two that has a lot of antique shades that my parents preferred, and if I do a little job like rebuilding a window, I can easily touch up any woodwork that needs to be blended back into the whole after getting a few corners separated, or nails pulled. They moved into a home for their last few years, and all the leftover paints they curated went off, so it is super cool to just whip up any shade one needs. Heck, I can patch the rust on my truck. The paint on the truck is a weird brown that Ford calls Stone Green. Burnt Umber and a little Ultramarine, ans you are in the ballpark.
I am also impressed with how versatile artist acrylic tube paint is. I am mostly interested in oil paint, but acrylic can be sorta similar, and it is very easy to use and clean up. Jobs I hate, like painting lures are now very easy (craft paint for that). Though using art paint for these kinds of purposes, is a little pricey. As I say, I got a ton of it cheap. When painting lures one can incorporate accents from marking pens, and other sources. The paint is waterproof and gets an epoxy topcoat anyway.
I can seem myself repairing and blending all kinds of finishes, as some restorers do. And it is not hard. I just follow the color wheel. I started getting perfect matches from the start. The worst thing that happens is one might mix a little more paint that one needs before hitting the shade. My problem tends to be I don't mix enough, so then I have to start over a few times per job.
Say I want a green. I just mix some ultramarine and yellow together, and I try to get close. Then I adjust for lighter or darker. Then I ask myself whether my mix needs to tend more to yellow, or more to blue. I adjust that, and again adjust the dark/light. That is all there is to it.
It gets complicated if you need to understand what you are doing. So if you want to make your paint darker, you might have to consider what will happen if you use Ivory Black, or Burnt Umber. The former tends to blue, and the latter is a dark yellow. Those would have effects, and they can also have chalking or glossing effect. But if you just give it a shot, rather than needing to understand the theory (unless you want to) it is simple.
Colours like Lime Green or Orange emergency colours can't be mixed from the primaries, unless you are using a palette more like ink jet ink, but most everything else can be mixed from basic primaries.
