Went to the Color Shop

If you request it, they will likely mail you your own wickedly beautiful hand-painted color chart of what they sell. Sure beats trying to get excited from a printed sample or from a chip on a website.

Unsponsored, promise. I'm just insanely crazy about Nova Color paint, as readers here know. Every thing they sell can be ordered via their site but that would cut out the fun of going to the tiny shop in an alley in LA and touching all the jars and jugs and looking at all the deeply inspiring hand-painted swatches on boards hanging from hooks on the walls, and talking wonk chemical make up of different mediums they make with their expert staff, petting the shop cat, and watching all the other artists in LA get buzzed in to get MORE!

Whenever I get to go there I always feel like I've been to a magical shop where I could buy COLOR, like a shop that sells "color", not colored paint, but actual Color-Color. A Color Shop. And I try to pick up a new swatch sheet as I've usually given mine away during the interval between shopping trips. This trip's haul is mostly for more landscape set painting of earth and grasses.

Part of my Nova purchase ritual is to smear a circle of fresh paint on the top of each jar to cover the price marked there and to show me visually what the color does, thick and thin. Then I mark the color off with a green highlighter on an old swatch sheet to track every Nova item I've purchased since I first found them. I also make a little swipe on a journal page along with the color's number for fun. Then I crack a few jars and start mixing to see what they can do, what happens.

Nova is one of my creative secret weapons. Everything I do is made-with or excited-by them.