Buster, in all sedimentary paints, 1983
About thirty years ago the watercolor world began to talk about pigments as Transparent, Staining and Opaque. At that time the thinking was — you choose your subject and then choose your pigment grouping: transparent for delicate subjects, stains for bold, opaque for earthy. What seemed to happen in practice was that artists came to prefer one grouping over the others
“That’s worth the price of the class!” When someone sings this out in a class — after I have just made a helpful hint aside — I always cringe. I hope not. But when you have struggled for ages with something and then hear a solution that sounds so easy, you think you might have paid to have known that.
One such time was when a man who had an arsenal of brushes — a huge array, displayed in a pleated stand-up carrier — cried out after I had just banged my brush on the bottom of the water container and said, “If you REALLY want to get the paint out of your brush, don’t just swish it in the clean water, but jump it up and down against the bottom of the container.”