With great displacement comes great responsibility – to coin a phrase.

I haven’t painted that much recently. Since Joy and I relocated to a relative’s house, it hasn’t been my top priority, nor do I have a regular place to paint. When I do paint, I check to make sure I’m not in the way; I set up; paint; clean up; pack up my stuff and put it away.  It’s only right; I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing any less.

Then I thought of my painting travel case. “Just the ticket!” I thought, “They make this kit for people who travel and, I am traveling, in a way…”

This is my portable painting kit:

The only trouble is, I am now used to painting on paper that is 9″ by 12″. The brush that comes with the case is teeny, probably about an eighth of an inch long. It would take me forever to cover that surface. I don’t think I could even paint a straight line more than an inch in length with this brush fully loaded.

Today’s experiment

I didn’t have the time to use the itty-bitty brush for today’s painting, but I wanted to use all the colors in the box.  I used my 3″ brush and dipped it into three of the pans at once to load it with three adjacent colors. Then I applied brush to paper. I painted the 4th color separately. I repeated the procedure for the opposite side and then painted the colors of the middle row.

Colors:

The colors on one side of the kit are: cadmium yellow pale; cadmium yellow; cadmium red pale; sap green.

The colors of the other side of the kit are: ultramarine; viridian; cobalt blue; alizarin crimson.

The colors in the middle column are: Chinese white; burnt sienna; burnt umber.

However, I could be mistaken, since, working in close quarters, before I began to paint, I tipped the box over and all the paints fell out of their respective pans. I put them back in the correct order (I think), but I could have made some mistakes.

Here is my painting:

Murder of Crows and Paintbox
9″x12″ 140# Rough Watercolor Block

Frankly, I don’t know why I painted in the crows. Perhaps it was a way to balance the cheery rainbow-ish colors. Maybe I just wanted to say the word ‘murder’, as in, “the situation Joy and I are in is murder.”