Veranda PBN Progress, Plate 1

3791

The first step, as I've said before, in completing a PaintWorks project, is to cover the black area and then the gray area.

I don't know if that's best practices or not, but they are the most optically-attractive part of the design, and compel me to go there first. Tonight, I covered the black areas (leaning over to check if I've closed the black paint pot, yes, yes, I did).

And thinking of the parenthetical in the statement above makes me want to point out one of the ways in which PaintWorks quality really shines out. These are acrylic paints, as are the vast majority of PBN kits you'll find today (when I was a kid they were as likely as not oil paints, as some of my stained shirts of the time would attest). Acrylics are versatile, mix handily, give themselves to a bunch of effects that look like watercolor or oil, but they dry quick, yo, and once they do, they're literally a sort of plastic. You can't thin them down or reuse them like watercolors.

I've lost at least one PBN paint pot this way. Forgetting to cap your paint at the end of a sesh might just cost you that pot. In the pot, though, PW paints dry slow enough that if you leave it uncapped overnight, you won't necessarily lose that color. You do have to put some water in there, thin it out, and make sure you cap it; dry acrylic paint is dry acrylic paint. But, you leave this open overnight, you don't necessarily lose it.

Don't take that for granted though. Like I just day, dry acrylic paint is dry acrylic paint. I have a paint morguefile, but not everyone does. Be careful about this.