Bangalore is much more all business with little time for fun, but I am thinking fondly of all the idly and dosa. And also the nice infusion of vitamin D I’ll get from a midwinter visit there.

Also yes, I am making my Sekaido shopping list.

I'm using Ligondeer to learn Japanese. I like it because it explains the grammatical concepts, has lots of listening and speaking practice, and uses recordings of native speakers and no AI crap.

I wish I had done a better job sticking with my Japanese study, because I've slowly dropped off since July. Nonetheless, I have two months to review what I learned and hopefully pick up some additional skills. Few things are as motivating as knowing the language will be of practical use.

Thanks, I’ll check it out. And switching out black makes sense. Black is rarely used in watercolor. In bigger palettes, I tend to use indigo as my near black, for example.

I do not, thought I just looked her up. Is this it? www.janeblundellart.com

I've also been spending a lot of time on handprint.com/HP/WCL/

It reminds me of what happened when I got into succulents and started picking up species names just as an effect of speaking with people more serious about them as a hobby, horticulturalist, conservationists, and scientists—which is a kind of friendly milieu in succulent world.

I know oils are very different than watercolors but I did a double take at yellow ochre used as a primary yellow. I think of the earths as a special category. Is that because it’s part of your 5 colors discipline or is it usual to use yellow ochre as your yellow in oils?

Next time I visit Tokyo (hopefully next year because I can roll it into a work trip) I plan to do a big shop in Sekaido for Holbein paint and natural hair brushes. Last time I hadn’t yet moved into artist grade paint or brushes and didn’t realize how extremely well priced they were.

CfM sort of specialize in hyperlocal palettes with alluring names like “Land’s End” and “California Desert” and “Outer Sunset”. They make some extremely specific convenience colors that work perfectly if you’re painting in San Francisco. Like their Olive Green is perfect for scrubby coastal bushes

It’s an easy preference to have since those paints are so well-known and widely available. At my skill level, I bet it makes little difference which brand I use as long as it’s artist grade. I also have a bunch of Case for Making which is hyperlocal and very big on custom color mixes.

I somewhat accidentally developed a preference for W&N because the first watercolor book I got from the library mentioned it was a good choice. The book was written by an English person. If I had read an American first I might have ended up with a different brand, like Daniel Smith.

I made a mistake, the green is Sap Green (Winsor & Newton) not Hooker’s Green. I keep thinking it’s Hooker’s Green when I don’t even own that color.

I think I could make garden painting work for me during the rainy season to scratch the pleinair itch. California is mild all year and even rainy days usually have at least a little break.

It also occurs to me I could bring my Sakura Koi travel palette at Christmas and let the nieces use it. They’ll almost certainly want to paint if I paint, and I think they are too young to handle artist grade pigments. Not because they are expensive but because some are toxic.

I’ll get to see all these art supplies at Christmas. I told my parents that ut can be my present from them, which sounds funny since I paid for the items, but being on hand to pick up the delivery and bringing the stuff back to the US is kind of a big deal.

The delivery system was incredibly efficient. They delivered the package to my parents’ place in a small Polish village within 2 days of my order. The village doesn’t even have its own post office so you route things from a nearby bigger village which is on a main trunk train line.

They still use złoty, yeah. PLN is the shorthand if you’re looking at the money transaction