Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Am I Blue??

Yes, I am blue.  Well, it's more like I am blue about one of my blues.

As children we all learned ROYGBIV (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet). And if one is sticking to the Original Crayola box of 8 (which is more like more like ROYGBBBV) you can add Black and Brown and skip Indigo. But, I digress.

In my palette of paints, I have 6 "Blues". There is Baby Blue, True Blue, Cobalt Blue, Turquoise, Phthalo Blue, and Deep Blue. I use a lot of blue in my paintings. And, I was happy with the Blues until this morning.

A little background here, it takes anywhere from 10 to 20 days for an acrylic painting to completely dry. The time depends on how thick the applied paint is.  So when I finish a painting, I put it on a table upstairs until it dries. When it is completely dry, I apply a polycrylic coating to seal the canvas. This takes 3 to 4 coats, then another 72 hours (at least) for that to dry.

This morning, I went to get a painting I knew should be dry to start the polycrylic process. I was dumbfounded to see that the "Blue" had bled over part of the painting. Turning the canvas over I could see where the blue had spread. The painting was all but ruined. Reviewing several other pieces with blues in them, I found 2 that also had "Blue" issues, but others with blues in them seemed fine. The question was: which "Blue" had bled. I needed to identify it so I would not use it again.  

I easily eliminated "Baby Blue" and "Phthalo Blue". That still left 4. I pulled out a blank small white canvas. Taking the 4 suspect blues, I squirted a circle of each on the canvas. To make sure there was no confusion, I placed each bottle next to its sample. It didn't take but an hour or so to find the guilty color. "True" Blue was the culprit. The sample of that one color at leaked through the canvas.

Lesson learned - The dependable blues are not true!

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