Marc Dalessio

My cigar box palette.

I just started using a good quality manganese blue again after a 4 year break. I remember finding it essential when traveling but of less use here in Italy. This summer however, there have been a couple of times when I’ve really struggled to get the exact hue I needed. Using the manganese for the last two weeks has made mixing some colors so much easier. I see more colors just by having the capability to get them. ‘Like scales falling from your eyes’ as Gammell said.

The same thing happens every year with my landscape students who bring brand-name yellow ochres outside and fight the chalky color for hours. Its impossible to key your colors correctly with tube paints which are full of extenders which dull the color.

Matching color in nature is hard enough with the right tools, with poor quality paints it becomes almost impossible.

I spend a lot of time driving around the Tuscan countryside every summer looking for great spots to paint.

An ongoing project of mine is to take a picture from every spot I find which I think is especially picturesque. The camera on my cellphone is set to automatically check the built-in gps system to see where I am in the world, and the phone is set to automatically upload my landscape photos to a Flickr set. Flickr can then parse the location data in the photo and place it on a map.

Another painter can then check my ‘landscape archive’ map on Flickr to see if any of the views interest them.

At the moment there are just a few practice shots up, but over the next couple months the map should fill up.

(The phone is a Nokia N82, if anyone was curious).

You can get the old Charles H. Cecil Studio’s handbook here. When I have some free time this winter I’ll try to update it.

It is in PDF format and the size is about 1.2 MB.