"Maintenance Never Stops"

Finally made a fast grab and growl trip to my favorite paint shop anywhere, Nova Color Paint (no brand deal, just love them). Made a big haul of colors and mediums that I'd used up in Halfland, plus a few little gifties for artistic friends in less then 10 minutes. Want to go again and stay longer. Again, one of my most favorite places to visit in LA.

One thing I do when I get back home is to make a circle smear of the color purchased on the lids of the jars to both cover over where the shop marks the prices in black (I don't need to see prices in my face when I want to use an item. It can make me hesitate to use the stuff freely, even with Nova's minimal prices) and so I can see the colors at a glance from their stacked wire bins.

I keep my colors in groups of neutral/fleshes, warms, mediums, cools, dyes/tints, and metallics. Having the new stock made me go through and throw out any dried up bottles and to organize what's left nicely.

Another shop system task done recently, but that doesn't show as well, is seen to the right of the paints. I made dozens of stapled paper envelopes for each of the remaining-to-be-done reference image boards, filing them by character, by set piece, or by production area, and bound them with a bulldog clip labelled with each name.

This makes working on several puppets and or other areas for the films at once easier. I can just grab the needed over-sized packet, now sorted into three giant cardboard category folders, spread the image boards out onto a table or the floor and work. Before the bound envelopes and folders it was hard to keep the growing number of boards for each item together when retrieving and re-retrieving and re-re-retriving them.

As the free-range homeless, former Motown singer, criminal dude we used to pay to wash our car and sweep the stairways at the loft taught me, "Maintenance never stops."