Adding colors to a representational painting that is in no way photo realistic can be incredibly complicated. The options are endless as are the potential for bad choices. A few rules to help you in the dark like a match on a windy night: Reflective light is 'warm'. Maybe only one rule-slash-guideline. Darkness again.
Mixing the colors themselves is the first step. I use only primary colors and mix the necessary shades I will eventually paint with. It's not the only way. It's just one method. While mixing your secondary colors and the lighter and darker shades thereof, something may suggest itself to you on the palette. Today not me. Not so much. They all shout their positive attributes to me while the canvas itself and painting to be is silent. Like a lover looking to see if you know what your doing.
Mixing the colors is also some kind of crazy therapy. The light of day illuminating the pigments on the palette, changing with every turn and scrape of the knife. The light reflecting off of the pigments and soaking into your retina and from there right into your central nervous system. I wish I could just do this all day. Mix a thousand different shades of a half dozen colors. Not really. That would be ultimately unsatisfying.
The wooden palette itself is making the job of painting more difficult every week (I would say every day, but I can't. See last entry). It is a thin piece of smooth, cheap particle board, with a thin layer of hardened pigment from every painting session from the last ten years affixed to it. The paint is thinker than the original tool itself and much heavier. It has me fantasizing about some gizmo to hold the palette always at the ready: telescoping, adjustable, some sort of cross between a music stand and a dentists work station on wheels. Sensitive to height changes but sturdy beneath the weight of the brush.
More so I fantasize about time. Time to think. Time to do it wrong. Time to get it right.

Weakened Painter

Worked on a new painting for 3 or 4 weeks. It had a certain poetry in the figure so even as I ran into problems with my color choices and abstract background shapes it was worth the battle to try and save. I scraped hours of work and bad decisions off the canvas on numerous occasions and worked through it. Finally I came home from work yesterday, had a couple of beers, my son was quiet and satisfied in his room for the moment and the paint on the palette was still usable: I squinted my eyes to see the major shapes and how they were reacting with everything and began applying pigment. Using a far too bright and bland value I attempted to simplify and rectify areas that had become misshapen and complicated. I realized almost immediately that my relaxed boozy techniques were too crass but I painted on with the anger and frustration of someone who works so many hours to pay the mortgage that his muse is effectively tied up and gagged and stuck in a closet five-sevenths of her days. On weekends she is drug out, untied, slapped straight and expected to perform immediately and with the brightness and vitality of an eternal spring morning. Instead, I stand there confounding my mind trying to use technique that is rusty and instincts that have been starved and choked.

I have a new sketch and a vague sense of how to attack it gnawing the back of my mind. In 4 more days I will wake up, feed and stroll back into the painting room, stare down a blank canvas like a prize fighter, looking for weaknesses and a way to win. The muse, unshackled and haggard, will not rub my back or massage my sore legs but she will still entice me, then play hide and seek with my minds eye. Showing me the way then disappearing, leaving me in the lurch; older, unshaven, unsuccessful and trying to expand a minor local notoriety into greatness. Again.